>>>What if I want to extract the files into ram, without passing for a file?
>>
>>you either go only half way (using a RAMdisc) or look at the sources of zlib, which is at the heart of many products. My guess is you are concerned with time needed and that those problems are more with the decompress/extract step, less with piping into a file and hanging the file into a dir structure
>
>I normally do alone.
>I wonder when I have little time.

The compression lib of the german dFPUG was basically a vfp wrapper also adding a GUI around zlib, but IIRC only for high level functions working on file and directory level. Dunno if they still offer it, it was with source and single file extraction was possible. Perhaps it could offer a basis to enhance to the extract to ram functionality with less effort than starting at zero. Used it around 2000, tweaked a bit the speed by adding an option to update the GUI not on each file written but at multiples of a property (for my uses 20 was good). My changes were included into the source back then and also into the analogue part included in the vfx framework. No idea on current state.

Almost all libraries offer some kind of dir analogue, although you sometimes have to read in a resulting txt file.
Writing and reading such relaively minute dir files should be in subsecond area for most uses