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Concept
Cabinet (file format)
Summary
Cabinet (or CAB) is an for Microsoft Windows that supports lossless data compression and embedded digital certificates used for maintaining archive integrity. Cabinet files have .cab s and are recognized by their first four bytes (also called their ) MSCF. Cabinet files were known originally as Diamond files.
A CAB archive can contain up to 65,535 folders (distinct to standard operating system directories), each of which can contain up to 65,535 files for a maximum of 4,294,836,225. Internally, each folder is treated as a single compressed block, which provides more efficient compression than individually compressing each file.
Every entry in a folder has to be a file. Due to this structure, it is not possible to store empty folders in CAB archives.
The following shows an example a CAB file structure, demonstrating the relationship between folders and files:
CAB file
First folder
Second folder
How paths should be handled is not specified in the CAB file format, leaving it to the software implementation:
Some affix file paths to filenames only, as if all files in a CAB archive are in a single folder. IExpress works this way, as does Microsoft Windows Explorer, which can open CAB archives as a folder.
Some can store the paths, and upon extraction, create folders as necessary. and (tools from Microsoft Cabinet SDK) as well as and (third-party open-source tools) work this way.
only since version 6 (which is included from Windows Vista to above) can extract files to their paths. The previous versions don't do it.
The CAB file format may employ the following compression algorithms:
DEFLATE: invented by Phil Katz, the author of the (specifically, the MSZIP encapsulation)
Quantum compression: licensed from David Stafford, the author of the Quantum archiver (not available in all versions of makecab.exe/diamond.exe)
LZX: invented by Jonathan Forbes and Tomi Poutanen, given to Microsoft when Forbes joined the company
NULL: stored
A CAB archive can reserve empty spaces in the archive as well as for each file in the archive, for some application-specific uses like digital signatures or arbitrary data.
Official source
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