[9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[pac]

Hi,

there is a manpage for compress, etc., in the Release 3; however, I can find there neither source, nor binaries.
Gzip/gunzip complains about the .Z files. I'm not fond of .Z, however, some archives still are. So do I need to switch to linux every time
I fetch the .Z file?

TIA, regards,
Peter

--
Peter A Cejchan
<cej at cejchan dot gli dot cas dot cz>

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Scott Schwartz]

> Gzip/gunzip complains about the .Z files.

Really?  The unix version of gunzip is happy with them.

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Lucio De Re]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 12:52:51PM -0400, Scott Schwartz wrote:
> 
> > Gzip/gunzip complains about the .Z files.
> 
> Really?  The unix version of gunzip is happy with them.

Indeed, and will even extract the contents from a single file ZIP
archive.  And Bzip2 will do all that and beat GZIP at compression,
sometimes quite significantly.

Amusingly, WinZIP has my admiration, too.  It really handles a
phenomenal range of storage formats.  I think it fails on
BZIP2, which is perplexing.

++L

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[pac]

>> On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 12:52:51PM -0400, Scott Schwartz wrote:
>> > 
>> > > Gzip/gunzip complains about the .Z files.
>> > 
>> > Really?  The unix version of gunzip is happy with them.

The gunzip manpage says, that gunzip cannot treat other compression methods than gzip's deflate.
It really complains about some of .Z

>> 
>> Indeed, and will even extract the contents from a single file ZIP
>> archive.  And Bzip2 will do all that 

I didn't know before. I'll give it a try...

>> and beat GZIP at compression,
>> sometimes quite significantly.

Yes, I know. It's my favourite compression format. 

>> 
>> Amusingly, WinZIP has my admiration, too.  It really handles a
>> phenomenal range of storage formats.  I think it fails on
>> BZIP2, which is perplexing.

I don't and won't use Windoze....
>> 
>> ++L
>> 



--
Peter A Cejchan
biologist
Acad. Sci., Prague, CZ
<cej at cejchan dot gli dot cas dot cz>

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Lucio De Re]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:21:47AM +0200, pac wrote:
> 
> The gunzip manpage says, that gunzip cannot treat other compression methods than gzip's deflate.
> It really complains about some of .Z
> 
 From the NetBSD man page:

	Gunzip can currently decompress files created by gzip
	zip, compress, compress -H or pack.  The detection of
	the input format is automatic... (some noise about bad
	compress).

> Yes, I know. It's my favourite compression format. 
> 
It's catching on, I guess it will do it faster than Gzip did.
> >> 
> >> Amusingly, WinZIP has my admiration, too.  It really handles a
> >> phenomenal range of storage formats.  I think it fails on
> >> BZIP2, which is perplexing.
> 
> I don't and won't use Windoze....

Some of us don't get a choice.  And it gives us something to
bitch about :-)

++L

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Lucio De Re]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:12:39PM +0200, Boyd Roberts wrote:
> 
> > I'm tired of compression programs that
> > know every other compression format.
> > They just confuse things.
> 
> don't they just.  more and more code, for what?
> 
Right, back to pack and unpack.  Disk space and memory are cheap
and bandwidth is becoming so.

++L

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Boyd Roberts]

> I'm tired of compression programs that
> know every other compression format.
> They just confuse things.

don't they just.  more and more code, for what?

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Lucio De Re]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 09:15:10AM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> 
> The Plan 9 gzip is not the NetBSD gzip.
> Sean Dorward wrote libflate and the
> Plan 9 gzip from scratch, and it only
> handles gzip deflate files, hence the name.
> I'm tired of compression programs that
> know every other compression format.
> They just confuse things.

Crossed wires.  The person who mentioned that Plan 9 gzip only
handles "flating" made it sound to me like that applied to all
known gzip flavours, hence my response.

As for known formats, it seems illogical to stop the unwinding of
compressed data on a philosophical ticket, specially as it often
is a trivial task to do the right thing.  Libflate and libz are
evidently very different, in this case.

BSD tar's "z" option uses libz or zcat, not sure which, so the
suggestion to add Bzip2 capabilities to it on uncompressing went
totally unchallenged.

Personal preferences in the actual compression formats may well be
an entirely different matter.

++L

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[Russ Cox]

The Plan 9 gzip is not the NetBSD gzip.
Sean Dorward wrote libflate and the
Plan 9 gzip from scratch, and it only
handles gzip deflate files, hence the name.
I'm tired of compression programs that
know every other compression format.
They just confuse things.

Re: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact

[rob pike]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 101 bytes --]

My mistake; I must have accidentally included the man page for stuff
I was not shipping.

-rob


[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 1625 bytes --]

From: pac <cej@cejchan.gli.cas.cz>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] compress, zcat, pack, compact
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 16:29:48 +0200
Message-ID: <cej-1010817162948.A01249@cejchan.gli.cas.cz>

Hi,

there is a manpage for compress, etc., in the Release 3; however, I can find there neither source, nor binaries.
Gzip/gunzip complains about the .Z files. I'm not fond of .Z, however, some archives still are. So do I need to switch to linux every time
I fetch the .Z file?

TIA, regards,
Peter

--
Peter A Cejchan
<cej at cejchan dot gli dot cas dot cz>