rbj@icst-cmr (Root Boy Jim) (08/27/86)
> Version history has always been something I've liked.... > Here's the best I can do from a largely ms-dos background.: > > sq/usq: > lbr: > arc: > uuencode/uudecode: > compress: > tar: > binhex: > packit: > > That's all I could come up with. > > Edward Vielmetti An article this informative should get a public thanks, so here it is. Now, if I only knew how to get ahold of all the authors/publishers Edward referred to... By the way, upon rereading it, I realized that my original posting might have been misleading. The purpose of uuencode is not to compress, but to make unprintable/unsendable files sendable, I believe. Thus, compressed/squeezed ASCII needs to be uuencoded. But this increases the size of the file, negating much of the benefit of the compression. This is all over and above the mashing that usq/arc and compress do against each other, again negating the beneficial effects of the squeezing. I just don't think it makes sense to do it. More garbage in net.sources. Sorry about that. Anyway, uuencode expands the character count by a ratio of 4/3, then adds a header line. To be effective, you must attain a compression rate of at least 25%. This is easily done on text, and on binarys which have to be encoded anyway, anything is welcome, and 25-30% is not uncommon. As an aside, there is a program called `btoa' which comes with compress that expands 4 chars to 5, and replaces 4 nulls with only one char. -- bc Bill Crews @ NetCor Data International ..!{seismo,gatech,ihnp4}!ut-sally!cyb-eng!bc (512) 835-2937 (Root Boy) Jim Cottrell <rbj@icst-cmr.arpa> LBJ, LBJ, how many JOKES did you tell today??!