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From: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Robert Montante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: PKX33A12 - a shareware archiving program
Message-ID: <2156@iuvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 6-Dec-86 21:46:16 EST
Article-I.D.: iuvax.2156
Posted: Sat Dec  6 21:46:16 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Dec-86 20:54:54 EST
References: <2408@ecsvax.UUCP> <2690@osu-eddie.UUCP> <635@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP>
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Robert Montante)
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 37
Summary: Thanx for code, and a comment on a bug report

First, Thanks to all who've responded to my request for a copy of PKARC
-- including Wayne Aiken, who sent me a copy from an address that I can't
send a reply to ("Bad mailer-daemon! No biscuit!").  Having tried it, I
can now add my two cents' worth to the following...

>Mark D. Freeman writes:
>>I think I have found a bug in this program.  If I have a directory full
>> [...]
>>Now try to extract bar.arc from foo.arc.  It won't work, giving a
>>phantom error which combines 'bar.arc' and the name of the first file in
>>the archive. 

Jim "Jack" Frost writes:
>Which version of ARC are you using?  When a friend and I, using ARC
>5.12, I think, tried ARCing an ARC file, it just came up with another
>ARC file (which unpacked just fine)   [...]

I was also able to combine (small) .ARC files from ARC v5.12 with PKARC v1.2
Indeed, all possible permutations (PKARC archiving its own .ARC files, archiving
ARC's files, and vice versa) successfully unpacked again.  I used text files.
If archiving of archives is a necessity, the speed advantage of PKARC is such
that it may be worth testing each occurrence for re-unpackability (?)

While I'm at it...I found PKARC to be much more compressive on binary files,
equivalent or a bit worse on text files.  I ran across an archive some time
ago that REALLY intrigued me -- ARC v5.12 was able to un-archive it, but it
had been created by something that did Lempel-Ziv compression to all the files
in the archive.  The remarkable thing was that some of these files came out
_Larger_ as a result of the L-Z compression, yet the overall .ARC file was
much _smaller_ than ARC v5.12 was able to achieve when I re-ARCed the files
to see what would happen.  Yow!

*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*-=-*

RAMontante, iuvax!bobmon
Computer Science				"Have you hugged ME today?"
Indiana University