Just something that occured to me...

Is there a difference between a) unzipping a file and b) exploring the zipped file, then copy&paste?

Thanks,
AnnaBtG.

The short answer: No.

The long answer:

Zip format is a way to bundle a bunch of files together and compress them so that they take up less hard drive space. Files cannot be used while they're still zipped.

The best way to think of it is probably just as the name implies -- a zippered pouch. You take everything, you stick it in the pouch, and then you zip the pouch closed. When you do that, you not only have everything bundled into a single pouch, but the pouch takes up less room than if you'd scattered everything. On the other hand, you can't actually get at anything without opening the pouch.

When zip format was first introduced, you needed a special program to unzip the files, and you also had to make sure that the version number of your unzip program was at least equal to the version number of the program that had been used to zip the files in the first place.

When you used unzip, the program would create a temporary copy of each file in the zip directory, decompress that file, and then copy the decompressed version to the location you specified. That way, the original zip file was left intact.

Since that time, however, both the zip and unzip programs have been built into windows. When you explore a zipped file, windows basically uses unzip to create the temporary decompressed copies, then pauses the process. You can look at the temporary copies, but because they're only temporary copies, they're not fully functional. When you move or copy those files to a new directory, thus making them permanent, you're completing the unzipping process.

In other words, you're doing exactly what windows would have done if you'd told it to extract the zipped files. Extracting is just another word for unzipping and uses (more or less) the same program.

Does that make sense?

Paul

It is a little bit complicated, but I think I got it. Thanks, Paul!

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

Lol, and WinRAR is far better than the built-in Windows unzipper. [plug] For instance, if you're trying to send very large files over e-mail or a messenger program, you can use WinRAR to compress the file, and split it into "volumes" of so many bytes, thus breaking it up into a size you know you can get files through one at a time. Then send them one by one. As long as the other person ALSO has WinRAR, they can then gather the files all into the same folder, double click on the first (or any one of them, I think), and extract the large file back out of the pieces. WinRAR also compresses things more tightly than WinZip, or the built-in WinZip. [/end plug]