Total Commander

Comparing files in TC directory with internals of install.cab in TC's installer never shows anything else but question marks. Checkboxes "by content" and "ignore date" are marked.
Everything else seems fine - there are file time stamps, sizes; files could be viewed in Lister and compared in Compare by content tool.
The reason for this peculiarity is unclear.

Edit. The main issue is that equal files still have a question mark, never an equal sign.

It's works this way for ANY directory with CAB archive on other side.
From TC help:

Dialog box: Synchronize directories
...
Note: You can synchronize the following combinations:
- Two directories
- A directory and an archive
- Two archives (not all types by content)

NO BUG - rather lack of function

2browny
It is the same if you copy the install.cab file to a folder on the harddisk and do the compare there - I think it has to do with the fact that TC cannot copy files to a cab file.

TC help on Synchronize tool does not mention any special treatment of .cab files.

Synchronize tool can update files on disk by extracting from .cab archive.
There are no technical barriers for comparing files if Lister and Compare by contents are working within Synchronize tool.

Since TC cannot write to cab files, syncronization can only go from cab-file to disk. But apart from that I agree that TC should be able to compare the files by content - the sync tool does compare two files if you press Ctrl+F3 , so why not during the compare operation.

Compare by content isn't currently done with files in CAB files. The problem is that CAB files are solid archives, which makes it very slow to compare files out of order.

Moderator message

How this problem resolves for .rar or .7z archives which also could be solid?

I'm doing special processing for 7zip and rar if they are solid archives, like comparing in the archive order when there is just one archive, or comparing hashes when there are two. I didn't see any reason to add this for CAB too because you can't modify CAB archives in TC. I will try to enable the method also for CAB files.

Thanks.
Sync tool also could be used for comparison only or for updating files on disk. Hence capability to compare files even in non-modifiable archives would be beneficial.

Great, seems to be working in RC5.

history.txt wrote:05.02.24 Fixed: Synchronize dirs: CAB archives couldn't be compared by content (32/64)

Change confirmed in TC 11.03rc5

Would it be possible to disable copying in the direction of the .cab file, since TC cannot write to it anyway.

Currently, if I accidently try to synchronize TO the cab file I get the error:
---------------------------
Error creating ZIP!
---------------------------
ZIP file contains errors or has unknown format, cannot change!
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

I prefer to show an error in this case.

Should it be CAB instead of ZIP in the error message?

The error actually comes from the internal ZIP packer, which fails to open the existing file (because it's not a ZIP file) and then shows this error. There is no CAB packer to be called.

If there is NO any CAB packer/unpacker- so HOW we can work with CAB archive content????
BUT if we CAN somehow to work with it - so obviously that any errors related to the process
of "unpacking" the any CAB archive should use only CAB name...