Zoo
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Zoo is a compressed archive format developed by Rahul Dhesi. It was one of the many competing archive formats in the 1980s, and was based (originally) on LZW compression. It had some popularity with Open/VMS and Amiga systems, but didn't ultimately win out over ZIP.
Contents |
Discussion
The Zoo software encompassed several different utilities, which were sometimes distributed individually, and which had their own version numbers.
- Zoo - The main program
- Ooz - Extractor
- Booz (Barebones Ooz) - Extractor; some versions can also list files
- Looz (Ooz with List) - Extract/list/execute
- Atoz - Helper utility for converting other formats (ARC, LBR) to Zoo
- Fiz - Analyze damaged Zoo files
- Stuff - File finder
Identification
Files have bytes DC A7 C4 FD at offset 20.
Compression
Known compression methods:
| ID | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | No packing | Uncompressed |
| 1 | LZD | LZW |
| 2 | LZH | LZ77+Huffman. Nearly identical to LHA's "lh5" method. A small difference is that Zoo defines a way to mark the end of data. |
Software
- Konvertor
- zoo-2.10pl1.tar.gz
- zoo-2.10-3.src.rpm
- Zoo - DOS binaries
- Booz v2.0 - Extractor; includes source code and DOS binary
- unzoo.c (Does not support LZW/LZD.)
- Deark
Sample files
- http://cd.textfiles.com/aminet0294/AMINET/UTIL/ARC/ → *.ZOO
- http://cd.textfiles.com/garbo/PC/ → .../*.ZOO
- http://cd.textfiles.com/geminiatari/ZIP/PROGRAM/ → *.ZOO
References
- Wikipedia: Zoo (file format)
- The ZOO Archive File Format from Corion.net, via FileFormat.info
- Archive format info, including ZOO
- ZOO file header format (among other archive types)
- The zoo Archiver User's Guide, by Bill Davidsen (for Zoo 2.01)
