Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!maytag!mks.com!andy From: andy@mks.com (Andy Toy) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: which archiver/compresser and encoder/decoder to use? Keywords: archivers, compression, encoding Message-ID: <1990Feb16.204951.12965@mks.com> Date: 16 Feb 90 20:49:51 GMT References: <1513@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <3418@plains.UUCP> <1990Feb14.154555.2435@mks.com> Reply-To: andy@mks.com (Andy Toy) Organization: Mortice Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Lines: 77 In article <1990Feb14.154555.2435@mks.com> I (Andy Toy) write: > arc,pkarc,pkpak,... .ARC archives have been around for a while, but cbip switched away from arc due to its cloudy future. Its shareware nature and the SEA vs PKware lawsuit sure caused a stir. However it is quite a popular format and versions are available for quite a few OS despite the introduction of compression formats (squashing) that caused compatiblity problems with the originator's version. Squashing did get added to arc though. Do we want to use a shareware archiver? > zoo Zoo is free and available on many OS. It is slower and does not compress as well as PK..., but better compression schemes could be added. It is being used NOW so it is easier to just stay with it. > pkzip Good programme, but not available for as many OS as arc and zoo. I cannot remember which OS zip/unzip was being developed for. I vaguely remember DOS (OS/2), VMS and AmigaDOS? There is an unzip programme available for BSD UNIX, but that doesn't help much if you want top put these ZIP files together on your BSD (or SYS V) UNIX system. Is cbip going to run into problems because of the shareware issue again? > lharc I don't know much about this, but there seems to be a lack of archivers using this compression scheme for DOS and UNIX. > tar,cpio,shar/compress This is the traditional UNIX distribution format, but it's not very suitable for DOS. Of course there are DOS versions of all these programmes. However it is rather cumbersome to deal with compressed archives of this nature. > uuencode/uudecode The advantage of this is its widespread availablility due to its inclusion in UNIX. It's been ported to various OS. One of its problems is that it uses characters that can get mapped improperly when passing through non-ASCII sites. > atob/btoa This has been used on UNIX too, but I can't remember its lineage. > abe This is Brad Templeton's new-fangled programme which seems to do exactly what we want probably because he had cbip in mind when he wrote it (thanks Brad). It's compatible with uuencode, and has lots of neat features and additional coding schemes (see Brad's posting in this newsgroup). > xxencode/xxdecode It's seems to be an improved uuencode/uudecode, but is not as widespread as it's predecessor. It doesn't have the problems that uu{en,de}code has with non-ASCII sites (that's what I hear). There are some others that I just though of that are used such .BOO files as found in Columbia's kermit area, binhex which is used a lot in Mac(?) circles. My preference? I would always tend to go with the free software as long as it is portable enough to have it work on all the relevant OS platforms. If source code is available then users can fix/add/improve things and pass these along to the author. I would choose zoo and abe. If there are deficienies, we can fix them. -- Andy Toy, Mortice Kern Systems Inc., Internet: andy@mks.com 35 King Street North, Waterloo, UUCP: uunet!watmath!mks!andy Ontario, CANADA N2J 2W9 Phone: 519-884-2251 FAX: 519-884-8861