title: Read and write directly from and to compressed files in C
body: <p>in Java I think it is possible to cruise through jar files like they were not compressed. Is there some similar (and portable) thing in C/C++ ?</p>
  
  <p>I would like to import binary data into memory from a large (zipped or similar) file without decompressing to disk first and afterwards writing to disk in a compressed way. </p>
  
  <p>Maybe some trick with shell pipes and the zip utility?</p>