PhysicsFS is a library to provide abstract access to various archives.
It is intended for use in video games, and the design was somewhat inspired
by Quake 3's file subsystem. The programmer defines a "write directory" on
the physical filesystem. No file writing done through the PhysicsFS API can
leave that write directory, for security. For example, an embedded scripting
language cannot write outside of this path if it uses PhysFS for all of its
I/O, which means that untrusted scripts can run more safely. Symbolic links
can be disabled as well, for added safety. For file reading, the programmer
lists directories and archives that form a "search path". Once the search
path is defined, it becomes a single, transparent hierarchical filesystem.
This makes for easy access to ZIP files in the same way as you access a file
directly on the disk, and it makes it easy to ship a new archive that will
override a previous archive on a per-file basis. Finally, PhysicsFS gives
you platform-abstracted means to determine if CD-ROMs are available, the
user's home directory, where in the real filesystem your program is running,
etc.

• ALT QA Team Robot
• Sergey Pinaev

• physfs
• physfs-devel