Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!ddl
From: ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: A Unix worthy Compress/Uncompress for the PC
Message-ID: <2867@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 16 Oct 89 00:50:49 GMT
References: <1240@marlin.NOSC.MIL> <2849@husc6.harvard.edu> <11293@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 35

In article <11293@smoke.BRL.MIL>, w8sdz@smoke.BRL.MIL (Keith Petersen) writes:
| In article <2849@husc6.harvard.edu> ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani) writes:
| >	The file compress.exe in pub/pcip on husc6.harvard.edu
| >does 16 bit compression/decompression.  It is available for
| >anonymous ftp.  (Use compress -d to uncompress.)   The source is around
| >somewhere but not handy at the moment; it was a fairly trivial modification
| >of the standard usenet distribution.
| 
| Be careful of this file.  I downloaded it from husc6.harvard.edu and
| attempted to run the program on my MSDOS machine.  It bombed.

	Please be specific.  I use this program constantly on everything
from original PCs to 386 boxes.  It has never "bombed."  Note that
you must remove TSRs and such as compress needs a lot of memory.
Note also that the compressed .EXE format (not to be confused with
the compression that compress does...) may cause problems on early
versions of DOS (though I have not seen such problems).

	I just checked the copy on husc6 and the UNIX sum output is:
06747    25
which agrees with the sum of the version I use at home.  Please check
to be sure you do not have a corrupted copy.

| I checked
| the file with DEBUG and found it's the XENIX version of compress, not
| the MSDOS version.

	There wasn't any "MSDOS version" and XENIX was the most appropriate
#ifdef choice for a starting point.  I don't know what you are trying
to look at with debug but surely you could see the MS-DOS header
and/or the lack of a XENIX header.  Compress.exe is an MS-DOS
executable, plain and simple.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@harvard.*