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From: w165011@yogi.ucdavis.edu (Telon Mistar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: ShrinkIt 3.2.1 is corrupted
Summary: Use sciibin and nulib if you can!
Message-ID: <11016@aggie.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 91 01:57:10 GMT
References: <13322@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <QbrG=K200WB9Q9AqNU@andrew.cmu.edu> <64768@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
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For those of you who are having trouble with all this downloading, only
to find Shrinkit (or any other program off the net) is corrupted, and
you just spent X minutes (or heaven forbid, hours!) wasted in
downloading...I'd suggest you try and get sciibin/nulib.

Note, both are in Public Domain or Share/Free-ware.  The source for both
ar readily available in C.  You can compile them (hopefully) on just
about any machine with a 'good' C compiler.

I've found that it helps ALOT to run sciibin on all the things I get off
comp.binaries.apple2 (as well as various anonymous ftp sites).  For one,
it makes the thing smaller (the un-Binscii'd version is usually much
smaller than a Binscii'd version of the same).  I also don't have to
worry about all the stupid Linefeed vs Carrieage Return problems as wel
(although Binscii v1.03 apparently does't really care either way).

It also allows me a chance to use Nulib, to check the integrity of the
ShrinkIt archives...so I don't have to download the whole mss, only to
find out it's no good.  It's also nice that, if the stuff was compressed
in the 'old' format (ie: pre-LZW2) you can unshrinkit with Nulib, so I
can read docuentation/readme on my Unix rather than finally at home.
hence, I can judge if the thing is worth dl'ing to begin with.

I realize some of you are not on systems that can do sciibin/nulib, and
I wish there were some way to fix that. But for thsoe of you who can, you
really ought to think about getting the two.

Hopefully this will lessen the amount of "File XX is no Good, can somone
do another" post.  

Maybe Nulib/Sciibin ought to be placed in teh FAQ as well.

Paul Hirose
ccrovac@yogi.ucdavis.edu