Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!brianc
From: brianc@cognos.uucp (Brian Campbell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: vi-like editor for the IBM PC
Message-ID: <5465@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 6 Mar 89 15:06:46 GMT
References: <688@nvuxl.UUCP> <20937@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <776@microsoft.UUCP> <7374@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Reply-To: brianc@cognos.UUCP (Brian Campbell)
Organization: Cognos Incorporated, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 43

ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) wrote:
| MKS (Mortice Kern Systems)
| 
| Offers a variety of packages that include vi, awk, and other **IX utilities.
| These are as close to the "real" thing as you can get under MiSerable Dos.

In article <7374@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> wnp@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Wolf Paul) writes:
|In article <776@microsoft.UUCP> w-colinp@microsoft.uucp (Colin Plumb) writes:
|> Here's the list of what's in the "MKS Toolkit":
|> ...
|> cpio
|
| Very good! It has a (non-standard) option to compress each file before
| adding it to the archive; unfortunately limited by the fact that MKS'
| compress does not support 16-bit compression. Another limitation is 
| that of course, such compressed cpio archives are not directly
| unpackable under UNIX -- you have to unpack them, and then manually
| run each extracted file through uncompress. Maybe this feature could
| be added to afio or pax, or maybe MKS could release the source for
| their cpio to the net? But I'd understand if they didn't :-).

I think you should recheck your documentation.  cpio does not compress
individual files; it compresses the output from cpio.  Thus, the mks
cpio command:
    ls * | cpio -ocz > file.cpio
is identical to the unix pipeline:
    ls * | cpio -oc | compress > file.cpio

|> compress
|> uncompress
|> zcat

| Unfortunately these handle only 12-bit compression and can't handle
| UNIX-compressed files (usually 16-bit)

Actually, they handle 14-bit compression.  Try some experiments, the
difference between 14-bit and 16-bit compression is often negligible.
I even have a list of words that gets better compression with 14 bits
than with 16 bits.
-- 
Brian Campbell        uucp: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!brianc
Cognos Incorporated   mail: POB 9707, 3755 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, K1G 3Z4
(613) 738-1338         fax: (613) 738-0002