From: Michael Hemy (mhemy+@cs.cmu.edu)
Date: 06/29/93


From: mhemy+@cs.cmu.edu (Michael Hemy)
Subject: gzip & CD-ROMs
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 15:51:50 GMT

I think this is an interresting question:
How do you gunzip a [BIG] file that is on a CD-ROM?

--You could copy it to your disk and gunzip it there -but then you
will reduce the available disk space by the size of the zfile which,
if you're tight in space can prevent it from working.

--I tried creating a link from the file in the CD-ROM to the disk and
issuing "gunzip -f". I think it would have worked, if I had enough
space left on the disk. (these contrib-?.z are larger then 10Mbytes
when compressed !!)
The -f is to force a decompression since the file is now a link and it
will not work otherwise.

What we need (IMHO) is for gzip to take an argument of a directory
where to put the files, and yes, I know that this is not a linux-specific
issue.

--Michael