[CajunGypsy]

Can anyone suggest a way to inspect the contents of an OS X archive file without unzipping it (besides using the shareware program ZipIt, which I already have)? WinXP users can open, view and extract items and folders from zipped packages as though they were ordinary folders; I miss that ability when I move over to my Mac.

[DawnG]

In the finder, select the archive, right click (or control-click) to reveal the contextual menu, and choose "Show Package Contents".
I don't know if this will work for your archives, but I use it when I have failed downloads from my online clip art service. Then I can extract the graphics file from the HQX archive that failed to expand after download.

[bastion]

That command shows the contents of OS X "package" files - directories which some software has told the system to treat as atomic. Won't work (or even appear as an available command) on anything that actually is a single file like a zip.

[bastion]

So why not use ZipIt? Ctrl-click or right-click and use the Open With command.

[CajunGypsy]

I don't want to use ZipIt because this is an older Mac which is maxed out on memory and current major apps (mainly Adobe's Creative Suite) are egregious RAM hogs, but have to be kept running all day to avoid waiting on relaunches. I'd really rather not have to launch another app in addition to Finder and whatever else is running just to look inside an archive (or several) and pull out one file or folder if there's an alternative within Finder.

[Chris Breen]

This is one of the features of Allume's StuffIt Deluxe.

[bastion]

I sort of see what you're saying, but what you're looking for isn't stock behavior (and it's not built-in behavior under Windows either...it's added by plugged-in code that's invoked at need). I also don't think that having it built into Finder would substantially reduce the resource consumption over using ZipIt, so you might as well just go with it. If you really wanted it, I could probably put together a context menu plugin this weekend that adds a "view zip contents" command but underneath it would still be launching an lightweight executable when you invoked it.