Date: Sat, 2 May 1992 17:30 CST
From: DARREL HANKERSON <HANK AT DUCVAX DOT AUBURN DOT EDU>
Subject: Re: unpacking gnu archives, f2c, tar, man pages
To: HORNE AT EDGE1 DOT PFC DOT MIT DOT EDU
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Status: O

>	1)  The library sources are meant to be 'sh'ed in a unix environment.
>	2)  By reading the thing, I can see that utilities echo 
>	    (I have it ) and sed are required, and a shell.
>	3) I found sed at SIMTEL but no user documentation was included. 
>	4) I found a unix-like shell at simtel, and tried to build the f2c
>	   library.

I'm not an expert at this. I've played with ms_sh (sh164), and it seems to
work with the few shells I've tried. Kai Uwe Rommel has been involved in this
(there is an OS2 version at hobbes.nmsu.edu), so I would expect it to be of
very high quality. I did have problems with subshells running in a dos box
under Windows. Many of the GNU stuff is at hobbes, and it would solve your
filename problem (provided OS2 is using HPFS). 

>	5)  It doesn't work.  I suspect the error (cannot create file)
>	    is because the script was written for a machine with non-DOS
>	    filename conventions.  I suspect I could modify it to work, but
>	    I don't know sed and have no manual.
>	6)  Therefore I hied off to mit.ai.prep.edu for the GNU sed, hoping
>	    to extract the man page.  (I have cawf from simtel.)

There are awf macros in awf.zoo which also seem to do a fairly complete job
of converting to man pages.


>	The Problem -- I can't dump the xxx.tar.z files.  I've tried djtarx,
>	zoo.exe, compress, and tar from simtel, in various combinations.
>       Could someone give me explicit instructions for unpacking the gnu 

Let's suppose you have the 8+3 filename problem, and your tar.Z file is
filename.taz. Do
  compress -d filename.taz					
then
  tar -xf filename.ta
GNU tar for DOS/OS2 is on hobbes in pub/os2/gnu (or some dir). GNU awk is 
also at hobbes, and runs under DOS/OS2.

--darrel hankerson hank AT ducvax DOT auburn DOT edu