Message-Id: <199810191410.KAA27869@delorie.com> Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 10:14:10 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com Subject: ANNOUNCE: A new port of GNU GZip uploaded MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com This is to announce that a DJGPP port of the GNU GZip package version 1.2.4.4294967299 (1998-09-16) was uploaded to SimTel.NET and should be shortly available from your nearest SimTel mirror. ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gzp124ab.zip ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2gnu/gzp124as.zip In case you didn't know, GZip is a file compression program. It uses the familiar Zip format, almost identical to the one used by PKZip and its work-alikes, but it does not support archives with several files in them; it can only compress a single file, and leaves the job of creating an archive to other programs. (GNU Tar will do that for you, and if you give Tar the -z switch, it will automatically compress the archive by piping it through GZip.) GZip can also decompress files compressed with the Unix programs `compress', `pack', and their work-alikes. It can decompress files compressed with PKZip or InfoZip's Zip, but only if a single file was compressed by it. In addition to `gzip' and `gunzip', the package also includes several shell scripts for related jobs. For example, `zdiff' and `zcmp' compare two compressed files by passing the uncompressed contents to `diff' and `cmp', respectively; `zgrep' searches compressed files for strings by invoking `grep'; `zmore' pages through a compressed file as if it were uncompressed; and `gzexe' runs a compressed executable program. Unlike previous ports, the binary distribution of this port includes *all* of these scripts, and their docs. You will need a port of Bash to run these scripts, but otherwise they were changed to run on DOS/Windows systems. The strange version number is because the original Unix distribution on which this port is based is an unofficial release I got from the GNU alpha site. However, since GZip didn't get any updates for a long time, and since the changes against the official v1.2.4 seem to be harmless and well-thought, it did make sense to me to use that version. The DJGPP incarnation of this version is called v1.2.4a for brevity ("gzip --version" still prints the above long version id). However, the *real* motivation for this port was to take care of a long-standing issue of insufficient support for LFN platforms. Previous ports of GZip used MSDOS-specific code fragments that forcibly truncated file names which exceed the 8+3 DOS limits. Thus, compressing `foo.tar' would produce `foo.taz' even if LFN was supported. This port changes that. On LFN platforms, `gzip' now behaves exactly as on Unix (`foo.tar' compressed into `foo.tar.gz'). `gunzip' looks for files with the `.gz' extension, and in addition looks for the butchered DOS-style extensions if the long variant is not found; thus, "gunzip foo.tar" will look for `foo.tar.gz', and if not found, will try `foo.tgz' and `foo.taz'. (I felt that such backwards compatibility is important and well worth the extra coding effort, especially for people who routinely copy files between LFN and non-LFN platforms, or set up dual-boot DOS/Windows9X systems.) There are several additional DJGPP-specific bug-fixes and enhancements in this port; please be sure to read the file gnu/gzip-1.24a/msdos/README.djgpp for details.