devel/physfs - The NetBSD Packages Collection

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.