The code for this recipe is available at https://github.com/dev-cafe/cmake-cookbook/tree/v1.0/chapter-05/recipe-01 and has a C++ example. The recipe is valid with CMake version 3.5 (and higher) and has been tested on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
When building some projects, we may need to interact with the host platform filesystem. The interaction with the files might be simply checking whether a file exists, creating a new file to store temporary information, creating or extracting an archive, and so forth. With CMake, we are not only able to generate the build system on different platforms, we are also able to perform these operations without complicated logic to abstract away the different operating systems. This recipe will show how to extract a previously downloaded archive in a portable way.
