Compressing many files

[MrSpeed]

I want to create a site that has thousands of files in thousands of folders. The directory structure can be up to 4 levels deep.

My original plan was to upload the data and then write a simple script to navigate the data.

Since the data is over 500Megs I was going to tar.gz it to FTP it onto the server.

Is there a way to keep the data compressed on the server but still have my script be able to read through the compressed file to present the data transparently to the surfer?

I was trying to figure out if the zip or zlib libraries would do the trick.

Thanks,
Rich

[vincevincevince]

maybe write a shell script and use passthru?