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From: jimb@amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler)
Newsgroups: net.micro.6809,net.micro.68k
Subject: Re: A standard OS-9 Archive Format
Message-ID: <11609@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-May-86 00:39:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.11609
Posted: Thu May  8 00:39:11 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 9-May-86 10:33:26 EDT
References: <1205@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: jimb@amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler)
Organization: AMD, Sunnyvale, California
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Xref: watmath net.micro.6809:834 net.micro.68k:1660

In article <1205@lsuc.UUCP> jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura) writes:
>
>     I noted the posting of 'par.c' and 'archx.c' to mod.sources recently.
>I have never used either.  Furthermore, my Unix node doesn't support
>..
>I don't like System V 'ar' format because it seems to use unprintable
>ASCII characters for something.  According to the documentation of 'archx.c',
>it doesn't.  As such, I'd like to propose usage of 'archx.c' as a standard
>archive format for OS-9'ers.

The par.c mechanism uses the BSD ar format for the file. This format,
unlike the SysV ar format, is pure ascii. i.e. if the files par'ed
together are all ascii files, the entire file is ascii.

My feelings about this are that this allows use of par'ed files on BSD
machines using ar, and BSD ar files on machines (such as my mac) using unpar.

I'm porting par/unpar to the Mac, if you care (as a single program). I
previously ported fpack to the Mac, for approximately the same use but it
doesn't support checksums.

I've ported par/unpar to a 68020 based BSD machine (which still uses the 
v7 ar for some reason), and found the checksum algorithm works there.
-- 
 Jim Budler
 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 (408) 749-5806
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