From: a.lawrence (alawrenc@sobeco.com)
Date: 10/18/92


From: alawrenc@sobeco.com (a.lawrence)
Subject: Re: Use of zip instead of compress
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1992 01:09:38 GMT

In <1835@lysator.liu.se> pen@lysator.liu.se (Peter Eriksson) writes:

>I don't have any religious feelings for either compress or zip or whatever.
>But a few questions since I'm not very familiar with zip (I've used it
>a few times to unpack and pack some archives).

>Can zip be used to uncompress/unpack/or-whatever-it-is-called a single
>file coming from stdin and writing the output to stdout?

>And the reverse?

>Can zip talk to raw devices (tape, diskette) directly and handle them
>correctly?

>Does it handle Unix-specific things (symlinks, ownership, protection
>codes) etc correctly?

1) Yes - Zip does accept input from stdin and write to stdout much the
   same as tar (- as file name).

2) Yes - Unzip does the same

3) No - atleast I have seen no mention in the documentation of any
   'special' ability to handle raw devices.

4) Yes/No - Permission are handled correctly, there is an option to
   handle symbolic links, unforetunately 'normal' links are handled
   as separate files (like cp). As far as I know there is no way to
   handle ownership.

   

-- 
If any given program runs correctly, it is obsolete.
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