Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!samsung!xanth!abcfd01.larc.nasa.gov!tadguy From: tadguy@abcfd01.larc.nasa.gov (Tad Guy) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Compress in 512K Message-ID: Date: 1 Jun 90 13:23:03 GMT References: <20725@snow-white.udel.EDU> Sender: news@cs.odu.edu Organization: NASA/Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA Lines: 39 In-reply-to: 91_bickingd@gar.union.edu's message of 31 May 90 22:58:30 GMT In article <20725@snow-white.udel.EDU> 91_bickingd@gar.union.edu (Bicking, David) writes: > >the sources for it are readily available, and it can be found on > >all kinds of systems. Perhaps xanth has a copy. anonymous ftp xanth.cs.odu.edu:/pub/compress.tar > >It also runs just fine on a 512K Amiga, let alone a 1M machine. Of > >course, you'd better not be doing anything ELSE on that 512K > >machine, but it WILL work. Depends on the number of bits used in compression. Back before I got more memory, I compiled compress on my 512k A1000 and had to use (I think) 12 bit compression to make it work -- anything larger required more memory than I had. The default from most vendor supplied versions is 16 bits... > The only version of Compress for the Amiga I have found needs MORE > than one meg, and the docs say, that's "just the way it is". It's probably compiled for more bits. You could try the -b option to specify less bits, but the files you uncompress have to have been generated with the same (or less) number of bits; even then it may not help since it was compiled for larger sizes... There have been some compress varients that can uncompress 16 bit files without having the extra memory (I don't know the availability of these, though). > When I said proprietary, I meant that it is generally only on unix systems. This isn't a problem. The code ports well... > It is not used on other systems that I have seen except to > extract files, other systems use PAK, ZIP, ZOO, or PKAX. All these that you list are archivers, which happen to also compress. Compress isn't an archiver -- it only compresses data... ...tad