Date   : Wed, 03 Jun 1992 13:03:17 +0100
From   : "Mik Davis" <davism@...>
Subject: Archivers

  That archiver I mentioned is pretty good. I managed to successfully archive
(and de-archive) Revs last night (one 6K file and a short BASIC prog).
  The only problem might be that there is no docs - it aint difficult tho'
  It stores files in ASCII format so binaries are BOOed first. this makes the 
archive rather larger than the source files but it can probably be compressed
with a text compression routine (I'm not an expert here - someone like to
comment?)
  all binary files (i.e. EVERYTHING other than pure ASCII) MUST be stored as
binary (this includes BASIC programs) but it does retain the addresses and the
entire filename (full path if required).
  It will work under any FS which supports direct file access (so sayeth the 
bit of text that IS supplied) so ADFS/NFS should be OK but I don't know how it 
would cope if you told it to store a directory - it might work actually, I'm
not sure (I only tested it under DFS).
  Both programs (Archiver and Dearchiver) are written in BASIC.
  I will upload them to the ftp site (shiraz?) in a few minutes. Does anyone
know of a PD text compression system that could be used to compress the final
archives? (for that matter, does anyone know whether compressing them is a good
idea?)


|         Michael Davis           |   If you can keep your head when all  |
|    davism@...                   |   around are losing theirs, you're    |
|_________________________________|   probably the executioner            |