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From: phayes@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Patrick W Hayes)
Subject: Re: Automatic opening of compressed (.Z) files upon clicking
Message-ID: <1991Apr22.085300.11931@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
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Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1991 08:53:00 GMT
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Well, I just found out that there is code out there to do close to what I want.
Reading through the April '90 issue of BuzzNUG (Now the NeXT User's Journal -
a great journal at that may I add) I found out about a program called Unknown,
in which one can add one's own icons, programs, and related suffixes. A .Z
icon is already included, but it is not set up to launch anything as is; for
that you must edit the Unknown.iconinfo file and re-make everything as is
described in the README and in the article "Unix Tools in the Workspace" in
that April '90 issue. (That's issue 5, available on sonata.cc.purdue.edu
in the pub/next/Newsletters/BUZZ directory - I think.)  The program that you
can launch is called Uncompress (note the initial capital letter) which just
parses the command line that was given to it by the workspace manager, and
then calls uncompress.  A version of this Uncompress with a few buttons etc.
is available on sonata as well in the pub/next/sources-1.0 directory, along
with the Unknown source.  But it must be modified to do what I want it to--
launch the uncompressed version automatically and then get rid of the
uncompressed version when I'm done with it.  I tried to get Unknown to launch
a script, but it didn't seem to work.  Really, NeXT should do something about
this; I shouldn't have to recompile Unknown and write an interface C program
every time I want to do something like this (launch a unix document off to a
standard unix utility from the workspace.)  Any ideas?

Patrick Hayes