I find it useful in some of the work I do to treat Zip archives as if they were directories. I don't think it would be too difficult to make it pretty much transparent, so that you could execute something like:
fileobj = magic_open("/path/to/some/archive.zip/some/internal/path/magic.txt") or equivalent for writing and other list-y, glob-y sorts of things. (In fact, I'd be mildly surprised if I couldn't find something on PyPI if I spent a few minutes searching.) As I considered that idea the other day, I thought, "Hmmm... might be useful for tar files as well." Alas, the tarfile module API didn't seem like it would support such a higher level API anywhere near as easily. Is that a fundamental property/shortcoming of the tarfile format, or is it just a function of the tarfile module's API? Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list