Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ulowell!page From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Binaries/sources Message-ID: <12009@swan.ulowell.edu> Date: 6 Mar 89 22:06:12 GMT References: <333@sagpd1.UUCP> Reply-To: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) Distribution: usa Organization: University of Lowell, Computer Science Dept. Lines: 118 monty@sagpd1.UUCP (Monty Saine) wrote: >I wish there was somekind of cron driven posting from Bob >to let the net know he is just busy and not dead. I was busy and almost dead. I am less busy in some respects now; mostly in the respect that you care about. I am still almost dead. In fact many people at ULowell these days are convinced I have but a few weeks to live, but I'll tell you that story some other time. I just set up a cron-driven monthly posting mechanism that will tell you what was posted in the last month, how to get stuff from the archives, and instructions on how to use the stuff posted to comp.binaries.amiga. Enclosed are those instructions. Sorry for the long silence. ..Bob ----- How To Use The Comp.Binaries.Amiga Postings - last update 6-Mar-89 Every comp.binaries.amiga submission is archived with the ZOO archive program, which does a fair amount of data compression and retains the original names, dates and directory structure within the archive. Because Usenet data paths are not 8-bit, these archives must be encoded to "regular ASCII" which is 7-bit. The encoding is done with a program called 'uuencode'. The version used adds a checksum at the end of each line, and includes the file size at the end of the encoding. Sometimes the files are too large for one posting (Usenet postings should generally be less than 64k bytes but you can sometimes get away with longer postings). If this uuencoded zoo archive is too large, it gets split into pieces, roughly 64k in length. Finally, the (possibly split) .zuu files are enclosed by some simple UNIX commands. This 'shell archive' is commonly known as a 'shar'. There is a more-or-less standard set of file extensions used to show the file type. The file extension is the set of characters after the dot (or period) in the name. The set of file extensions used is: .zoo An archive file in ZOO format .zuu A .zoo file that's been uuencoded .zu1 The first file in a split .zuu file .zu9 The ninth file in a split .zuu file .zu10 The tenth file in a split .zuu file .uu1 The first shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu .uu9 The ninth shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu .uu10 The tenth shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu To get all this back into a usable form, you need to: 1. Unpack the files from the shar format (the verb is usually called 'unshar'). You can either use a standard text editor to remove the info, or the unix 'sh' (Bourne Shell), or a publicly available tool to do it for you. With some tools (like 'sh'), you are required to remove the Usenet header information first; other unshar tools will remove it for you. Once you unshar a .uu? file, you'll have a .zu? file. 2. Combine all the .zu? pieces into a large .zuu file. You should use something like 'cat' under UNIX or 'join' under AmigaDOS. It is important that you combine the pieces in numerical order. Be aware that the single digit pieces do not have a leading zero, so a wildcard sort will probably not do what you want. Instead, you should specify the files in this way: zu? zu??, which will do the single digit files first, then the double digits. You can rest assured there will not be any triple-digit postings. 3. Convert the .zuu file to a .zoo file with the 'uudecode' program. If you have a version of uudecode that understands the checksum and file size information, you should use it. If you don't, you can still use the old uudecode program, but you will not know if the file has somehow become corrupt. 4. You now have a .zoo file. To extract the files into a directory, you need a program called 'zoo'. After "un-zoo'ing", most submissions will have some documentation to tell how to set up and run the software on your Amiga. --------- Of course you need to get the program(s) to your Amiga to run them. Usually this means downloading the software to your Amiga through a terminal program. If you want to download the files as quickly as possible to your Amiga, you should do steps 1-3 above on your UNIX machine and download the .zoo file to your Amiga, since the .zoo file is the smallest of the files. It's also usually faster and easier to do steps 1-3 on the UNIX machine because you have less worry about disk and memory limitations. However, some terminal emulators available for the Amiga do not handle binary downloads well. Experiment with yours and see. If you have trouble, you might try a different protocol or different terminal program. If all else fails, you can download the .zuu file, which is an ascii file, and do the uudecode on your Amiga. The mechanics of terminal programs, protocols and downloading are beyond the scope of this document. Most terminal programs should have a manual section describing how to log in and do remote downloads. --------- Here are the tools you need, under UNIX, AmigaDOS, or both. All are publicly available; you do not need to purchase anything to make use of the software that comes across in comp.binaries.amiga. shar, sh, unshar - a tool to unpack the shell archives, or use an editor cat or join - to append the split .zu? files to one .zuu file uudecode - to decode the .zuu file to a .zoo file zoo - to unpack the ZOO archive. -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page Have five nice days.