CVIII. Zlib Compression Functions
This module uses the functions of zlib by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler to transparently read and write gzip (.gz) compressed files. You have to use a zlib version >= 1.0.9 with this module.
This module contains versions of most of the filesystem functions which work with gzip-compressed files (and uncompressed files, too, but not with sockets).
Note: The current CVS version 4.0.4-dev introduces a fopen-wrapper for .gz-files, so that you can use a special \'zlib:\' URL to access compressed files transparently using the normal f*() file access functions if you prepend the filename or path with a \'zlib:\' prefix when calling fopen().
This feature requires a C runtime library that provides the fopencookie() function. To my current knowledge the GNU libc is the only library that provides this feature.