is there an api to store and load the entire imfs to and from persistent storage as a single file?

[weihsiu]

i looked around and couldn't find an api that would store and load the entire imfs to and from persistent storage. it would be a tremendous feature to be able to persist the file system and load it back some time later.

[cgdecker]

You should be able to do that using the standard file APIs. Here's what I'd suggest:

• Create a .zip file on the file system you want to persist to.
• Open that zip file as a FileSystem using FileSystems.newFileSystem(Path, ClassLoader).
• Recursively copy the files in the root of your in memory file system to the zip file system's root.
• Close the zip FileSystem.

[cgdecker]

(This isn't something I'm likely to add to Jimfs itself as it basically boils down to a method to create a zip file from the contents of a directory.)