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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.

WWW: http://icculus.org/physfs/