wimlib

I don't have time to debug your script, but yes assuming you want the new "system compression", not the traditional NTFS compression, FSCTL_SET_EXTERNAL_BACKING is the right API to use. Also as JFX noted using the native API (ntdll) is not required; however, there is a small reason (noted ...

A WIM created with the --pipable option is like a normal WIM, except some of the data is rearranged to make it possible to extract sequentially. It's still "file-based".

The output will be garbled because both commands will print their progress lines at the same time. There isn't a --quiet option yet, but you could try redirecting the output of the second command to /dev/null ("nul" in cmd.exe) I guess.

Powershell corrupts binary data; I can't do anything about it. Use cmd.exe instead.

It's possible to abuse the pipable WIM support to copy a directory:
Although, you could just use 'cp -a src dst' instead. (Or 'xcopy /e' on Windows.)

With wimlib-imagex you can use a command like: $ wimdir --detail test.wim 1 --path=ntoskrnl.exe --detailed Full Path = "/ntoskrnl.exe" Short Name = "" Attributes = 0x00000080 FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL is set Security Descriptor = 010004801400000024000000000000004000000001020000000000...

Thanks for reporting this! Yes, negative UNIX timestamps were not being handled correctly. Specifically, they seem to have been getting stored correctly, but were not being extracted or displayed correctly. I also found that the 32-bit Windows build of wimlib had additional problems caused by using ...

Can you please provide the exact error message, not a paraphrased one? Also, what operating system is this on (Linux/Windows/Mac/etc.)? And if you happen to be directly capturing an NTFS volume (via a block device), which version of libntfs-3g is wimlib linked to, and did it change when you upgraded...

Update: this was fixed in NTFS-3G version 2017.3.23 by commit 17b56ccfa233 ("Allowed names with trailing dot or space on conditions").

Sorry, what happened was that the NTFS-3G maintainer preferred something different, and I've been too lazy to make a new proposal. I'll look into it again.