open .zip from memory...

Not sure if my subject is misleading or not, but anyway, here it goes... I am trying to download a file using file_get_contents($url) which happens to be a .zip file. I have no issues downloading the file, saving it to the harddrive, opening it, and getting what i need from it... but what I am trying to do, is not save it to disk, but to just grab the .zip file, and open it in memory, grab the file i need from it, and then discard the .zip file, and parse out the file i grabbed (this would prevent having a folder with R/W access that could possibly be set wrong, or using the /tmp folder) Again, I dont have any issues doing it where i save it first, but when I try to use the file from memory, i get errors saying that it can't open the zip file becuase it has no valid resource id#. The zip commands i am using, are the php ones zip_open, zip_read, zip_entry_read, zip_entry_name, zip_entry_filesize and obviously zip_close. Can this be done, or should I just forget it, and use the /tmp dir? Steve.