Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cica!iuvax!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: which archiver/compresser and encoder/decoder to use?
Message-ID: <100938@looking.on.ca>
Date: 23 Feb 90 01:46:22 GMT
References: <36517@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <7806@yunexus.UUCP> <36569@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <100118@looking.on.ca> <448@wjh12.harvard.edu>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 32
Class: discussion

In article <448@wjh12.harvard.edu> djb@wjh12.UUCP (David J. Birnbaum) writes:
>The latter feature, alas, is not supported in the MS-DOS version of DABE,
>perhaps because command.com isn't as friendly about sorting filenames as
>other operating systems.  Be that as it may, DABE on an MS-DOS system
>will require help in getting the pieces in the correct order.  I usually
>do all archiving and 7-bit encoding on my PC, so that this missing feature
>in the MS-DOS implementation of DABE is significant.  I should add that
>the other decoders (XXDECODE, ASCIFY, and UTIL3) do not provide a facility
>for combining pieces of files at all.  DABE at least provides it
>on some systems.  Adding this feature to the MS-DOS implementation of
>DABE would increase its appeal.

DABE does not require the parts in any particular order, if the encoding
was made with redundant headers, as I would expect multi-part postings
to this group to be.   While it is true that under DOS you can't
do
	dabe *.abe
because I wanted to keep dabe as 99% portable code, not full of ifdefs and
special OS calls, you can do

	dabe file4 file1 file3 file2
or
	somecat file* | dabe

if 'somecat' is a smart DOS cat that handles patterns.  This handling of
patterns should not go in every program, if we can avoid it.  In a imple
case like this (catting) we can.

Is it better to break the purity of the DABE code (currently only 4 short
ifdefs for setting file modes/times etc.) to add DOS directory scans?
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473