Reading Archives

igir supports scanning the contents of archives for ROMs, DATs, and ROM patches.

Supported types for reading

igir supports most common archive formats:

Extension	Contains file CRC32s	igir can extract without a third-party binary	igir can checksum without temporary files
.7z	✅	❌	❌
.gz, .gzip	❌ CRC16	❌	❌
.rar	✅	✅	❌
.tar	❌	✅	✅ ≤64MiB
.tar.gz, .tgz	❌	✅	✅ ≤64MiB
.z01	✅	❌	❌
.zip (including zip64)	✅	✅	✅ ≤64MiB
.zip.001	✅	❌	❌
.zipx	✅	❌	❌

You should prefer archive formats that have CRC32 checksum information for each file.

By default, igir uses CRC32 information to match ROMs to DAT entries. If an archive already contains CRC32 information for each file, then igir doesn't need to extract each file and compute its CRC32. This can save a lot of time on large archives.

This is why you should use the igir zip command when organizing your primary ROM collection. It is much faster for igir to scan archives with CRC32 information, speeding up actions such as merging new ROMs into an existing collection.

You should prefer archive formats that igir can extract natively.

Somewhat proprietary archive formats such as .7z and .rar require igir to use an external tool to enumerate and extract files. This can greatly slow down processing speed.

This is why igir uses .zip as its output archive of choice, .zip files are easy and fast to read, even if they can't offer as high of compression as other formats.

Checksum cache

It can be expensive to calculate checksums of files within archives, especially MD5, SHA1, and SHA256. If igir needs to calculate a checksum that is not easily read from the archive (see above), it will cache the result in a file named igir.cache. This cached result will then be used as long as the input file's size and modified timestamp remain the same.

Caching can be disabled with the --disable-cache option, or you can safely delete igir.cache if it becomes too large.