Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pacbell!att-ih!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Standard for file transmission
Message-ID: <5098@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 88 05:39:45 GMT
References: <292@cullsj.UUCP> <55@psuhcx.psu.edu> <25816@clyde.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 18
Keywords: protocol compression source

In article <25816@clyde.ATT.COM> wtr@moss.UUCP (Bill Rankin) writes:
>
>Personally, I use cpio & compress to move files.  I don't care 
>about execution time, rather transmission time is my most important

I like this also, but if an entire cpio archive is compressed, it
is impossible to (a) list the directory without a decompression pass
or (b) recover any part beyond a bit error in transmission.  Has
anyone condsidered a program which would leave the cpio headers
uncompressed but store the data as though each file had been individually
compressed (including adding the .Z to the name so extraction would be
possible with a normal cpio followed by uncompress)?  This would be
a nice thing to use for normal backups, especially if it followed the
normal compress rules of not trying to compress something that already
had the .Z extension. That still leaves the problem of compress needing
2 extra characters in the filename and DOS needing some other name convention
entirely...

  Les Mikesell