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From: stolcke@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU (Andreas Stolcke)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs,comp.compression
Subject: Re: Problem with compress
Summary: compressdir is the answer
Message-ID: <1991May15.031818.6182@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 15 May 91 03:18:18 GMT
References: <1991May14.044431.23932@sparky.IMD.Sterling.COM> <26085: May1416:52:3491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root)
Organization: International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 42

In article <26085:May1416:52:3491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>, brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
|> (I'm not sure whether this is appropriate for comp.compression.)
|> 
|> In article <1991May14.044431.23932@sparky.IMD.Sterling.COM> kent@sparky.IMD.Sterling.COM (Kent Landfield) writes:
|> > I received an interesting question today, one I had never really considered.
|> > "How does compress deal with symbolic links ?"
|> 
|> compress isn't a BSD program. It uses stat(), and its behavior makes
|> perfect sense.
|> 
|> I think compressors should ignore problems like this. They shouldn't
|> open files, they shouldn't close files, they shouldn't do anything but
|> read data and write compressed data. This also makes them more portable.
|> A separate, system-dependent program can do the dirty work.

It so happens that there is such a command that I think is fairly widely
available (if not it should be).  It is called compressdir and recursively
traverses a directory tree attempting to compress every plain file it
finds.  I it picked up as part of the TeX distribution, a copy is 
appended.  There is a also a companion script called uncompressdir.

-- 
Andreas Stolcke					stolcke@icsi.berkeley.edu
International Computer Science Institute	stolcke@ucbicsi.bitnet
1957 Center St., Suite 600, Berkeley, CA 94704	(415) 642-4274 ext. 126
---
OPTIONS=
FILES=
for ARG
do
        case "$ARG" in
        -*)     OPTIONS="$OPTIONS $ARG";;
        *)      FILES="$FILES $ARG";;
        esac
done
if test -z "$FILES"; then
        FILES="."
fi
set $FILES
find $@ -type f -links 1 -exec test -r {} -a -s {} \; \
-exec expr '(' {} : '.*\.Z' ')' '=' 0 \; \
-exec compress $OPTIONS {} \; >/dev/null