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Mail Archives: djgpp-announce/1998/10/19/10:22:59

Message-Id: <199810191410.KAA27869@delorie.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 10:14:10 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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
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.

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