If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

Question

If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?

In: 1276

Answer 1

If you are asking why can’t you execute a script or program from a compressed file, the answer is that the application depends on relative file paths of adjacent files.

So if that’s an exe with dlls, everything needs to extract to a plain folder. When you ‘open’ content directly from a zip, the OS is technically decrypting that single file to a temporary path and then running from there.

If you have a zip that contains a single self-contained file, (an exe can embed references), then launching from zip just works, just as opening any single file ‘works’.