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From: wjb@moscom.UUCP (Bill de Beaubien)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: Problems running compress from perl on MS-DOS
Keywords: compress, perl, MS-DOS
Message-ID: <2736@moscom.UUCP>
Date: 10 May 91 13:28:46 GMT
References: <991@camco.Celestial.COM>
Reply-To: wjb@moscom.UUCP (Bill de Beaubien)
Organization: Moscom Corp., E. Rochester, NY
Lines: 40

In article <991@camco.Celestial.COM> bill@camco.Celestial.COM (Bill Campbell) writes:
 >I am trying to build an archive of compressed files on an MS-DOS
 >system using a perl script....  
[code omitted]
 >	1.	It frequently says that it is out of memory compressing
 >		from stdin.  I have recompiled compress for 12-bit
 >		compression and it does this less frequently, but it
 >		still does it.
 >	2.	The compressed file is longer than it should be.  It
 >		appears that it might be created as a text file rather
 >		than binary when the standard output is redirected to the
 >		file.
 >
 >I'm using compress,v 4.3d compiled with Xenix cc -dos in large model.
 >
 >I don't know much about MS-DOS (by choice), and don't understand
 >why this should fail in this manner.  Compressing in-place works
 >fine under MS-DOS.
 >
 >Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

Well, I don't know much about compress, but it seems reasonable that if
you try to run it from a shell under Perl it's going to have a lot less
memory to work with.  Perl 4.0p3 works out to 313k (no optimization),
plus memory for the shell, leaving you with maybe 200k to work with,
if you're lucky.  Running out of memory's hardly a surprise...

 >
 >Thanks
 >-- 
 >INTERNET:  bill@Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software
 >UUCP:   ...!thebes!camco!bill   6641 East Mercer Way
 >             uunet!camco!bill   Mercer Island, WA 98040; (206) 947-5591


-- 
"Bless me, Father; I ate a lizard."
"Was it an abstinence day, and was it artificially prepared?"
-------------------------------------------------------------
Bill de Beaubien / wjb@moscom.com