ZCMenu Project Overview

ZCMenu is a small non-invasive implementation of ZIP archive context menu handler for the Windows.  There is no GUI interface because you don't need one for zipping and unzipping.  The self-contained ZCMenu intaller weighs in at under 600k, installs three registry changes to create the context menus, and copies five files to your %systemroot%/system32 directory to provide ZIP and UNZIP functionality.

There are no DLL dependencies, no system hooks, and no resident programs.  No start menu changes either.  The whole point of this project was to provide context menus for explorer to handle ZIP archives with at little impact on Windows as possible.  Did I mention that there are no nag screens, no cost to use, and source code for the whole thing is available online?

ZCMenu is hosted on...

SourceForge.net Logo   ZCMenu Summary Page | ZCMenu Forums | ZCMenu Downloads

Goals of ZCMenu

Otherwise known as "how can I tell it's done?"

Software project goals have to be well defined otherwise feature creep will prevent the program from ever getting finished.  The goals which will determine when to end the ZCMenu project are (in the order of importance):

  • (DONE) Ability to create a ZIP archive from a single file or a directory
  • (DONE) Ability to unpack a ZIP archive to a directory
  • (DONE) Operates on Windows 2000
  • (TODO) Extend context menu system to handle RAR, ARC, and BZip2 archives
  • (TODO) Intelligent error handling

With the initial release, ZIP archive handling is complete and it's operational on Win2k and probably XP (any volunteers to test on XP?)--it should work on WinNT as well.  Installation will fail on Win9x/ME because the setup script utilizes WinNT/2k/XP specific DOS extensions.

There is no error handling at the moment--that's a work in progress.  Most of the errors encountered with ZCMenu are operator errors.  Trying to do illogical operations such as compressing "My Computer" won't work.  The only real error conditions I've run into are encrypted archive decompression and running out of disk space.  Since the vast majority of ZIP files are not encrypted, I don't consider this to be a high priority issue.

Extending the system to handle RAR and ACE depends on wether the command line versions of those compressors support LFN (to be determined).  ZIP archives remain the most popular archive format so support for alternative archive formats is not a high priority issue.  That and I don't want too much junk in my context menus.

Current State of ZCMenu

Known Issues:

Installation from a network share fails.  Either copy the install exe to a local drive or map the share to a drive letter then install.

UNTESTED ON XP.  If anyone wants to volunteer and test basic ZIP/UNZIP functionality of ZCMenu on XP I'd appreciate it.

No error handling.  If you get an error for any ZIP handling process there's no visible error messages.  The DOS box doing the ZIP operation closes before anyone can read the error output.

Regards,

BitBandit
bitbandit@users.sourceforge.net

Webpage

No frames, no tables, LYNX friendly, and there's only two graphic elements, the 4k background wallpaper and the 1k SourceForge logo.  Everything else is done as a CSS stylesheet.