Free Archiving Utility

[c.davis]

Another handy utility for grabs.

This time it's an archiving utility called "SecureCAB" and as its name suggests, creates secure cab archives by means of optional encryption.

To make it easy to discern between cabs made with other utilities and ours, archives are given a .scab extension (this is intended to mean SecureCAB but I do see the humor in it too).

This compresses entire directory trees and not individual files, although I may extend it to do so.

This utility can be found at http://files.star-os.com in the 'Utilities' section.

Please, test and report back.

[tog]

Let me be the first one (hopefully) to say quit picking at your .scabs.

Your free software utils are nice are appreciated, but I have so many BSD boxes around I just can't bring myself to install a windows syslogd for any reason. Hopefully it will be useful to others, though.

If you extend this to compress individual files or groups of files like any other archiver utility, you might just create a following for it. I'm sure people would like an archiver that has real encryption. What kind of encryption are you using, by the way? AES?

[c.davis]

This was originally intended to be the compression portion of a backup system that I've been working on for my source code tree at work which is why it only handles directory trees at the moment. After testing it against zips and rars, I found it to be faster and a higher compression ratio, results will vary depending on what is being compressed.

Another reason that I chose the CAB format as a base was because in a standards based cab Vista has the ability to search not only for filenames inside the archive but also strings of text.

You're right, the encryption is AES.

I'll play around with it on the weekend to add individual file support and possibly some other things.

Thanks for the feedback.