LANTERNCPIO ARCHIVE TOOLS

LanternCPIO is an implementation of the cpio archive format in portable C, and a small and simple utility to create cpio files on Windows. This is useful for creating collections of any kind of files (similar in concept to a DOOM WAD, for instance, or a zip file without compression). The Lantern cpio implementation is extremely simple, while still being compatible with standard cpio tools on Linux and BSD.

The main advantage of a format like cpio (or tar or ar) over something like .zip is that the implementation is much simpler, the archives are easier to manually inspect from in-engine, and using it requires fewer dependencies.

The cpio archive creator is included because there are relatively few utilities available for Windows that can create cpio files.