Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!petunia!news
From: jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: PKZIP does zip on uuencoded files?
Message-ID: <269a17c6.3a53@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 10 Jul 90 18:00:38 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Cal Poly State Univ,CSC Dept,San Luis Obispo,CA 93407
Lines: 30



In an article dmm0t@hudson.acc.Virginia.EDU (David M. Meyer) wrote:
>In an article jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck) writes:
>>I have been trying to archive to diskette a bunch of the uuencoded software
>>that I have collected off of the net news, and I was surprised to find that
>>PKZIP 1.10 gives a compression ratio of 0% on uuencoded files.  This seems
>>curious, since obviously uuencoding decreases the information density.
>
>You must be kidding.  I usually get 25-40% compression on uuencoded
>files.  Are you using the "-ex" option, to get maximum compression?
>
Well, I looked back at the files that I was trying to zip, and discovered
that they all were compressed (.Z) files before uuencoding.

So I wouldn't really expect zip to be able to do too much compression on
the .Z files.  But still I would think that since uuencoding maps the binary
data onto the printable ascii character set, it would be possible to recompress
the data into 8-bit bytes taking full advantage of the size of a byte.

I guess that it is expecting too much for it to reverse the effect of 
uuencoding.  If that is what I want, I should use uudecode :^)

The reason I didn't want to uudecode them under dos is that some files used
unix filenames which would be lost.

-- 
John Dudeck                                 "I always ask them, How well do
jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu                            you want it tested?"
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549                               -- D. Stearns