Spotlight and zip files

[cgundlach]

Does anyone know if there is a way to get Spotlight to index zip files? I looked on Apple's site and didn't see a plugin for this. I would have expected zip files to work out of the box.

 

[robbieduncan]

The problem is that a zip file conceptually contains lots of files. Spotlight works on a file-by-file basis. So whilst you could write a plugin to index the zip file itself (normal file attributes like size of file, modified date and so on as well as zip attributes (number of contained files for example)) it would not be able to index the files within the zip file which is what would actually be usefull.

 

[cgundlach]

The problem is that a zip file conceptually contains lots of files. Spotlight works on a file-by-file basis. So whilst you could write a plugin to index the zip file itself (normal file attributes like size of file, modified date and so on as well as zip attributes (number of contained files for example)) it would not be able to index the files within the zip file which is what would actually be usefull.

I don't know anything about how Spotlight API works, but a zip is really no different than a directory. Aside from that, anyone who has ever worked with java knows how sweet it would be to say "I'm looking for com.sun.xml.rpc.tools.ant.Wscompile", for instance.