[comp.sys.att] warning about the compress in UnixPC SysV 3.51

david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) (12/11/87)

Just a quick warning that the compress which comes with the system
is compiled at something smaller than full size.  I found this out
when I was moving the tar file for the latest GNU emacs over to my
machine and compress died halfway through.

Recompiling compress from the sources and forcing it to use a full
size array created a compress program which uncompressed the whole
archive.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about ... part of 
the procedure for building compress is  a shell script which tries
to figure out how big a program can run on your system.  It then makes
a #define USERMEM which is included into compress.c and ends up
determining the maximum number of "bits" this copy of compress will
be able to handle.  By default on a UnixPC, the script generates
a fairly small number, yet the system itself is capable of supporting
the full size number.  (er... at least on *my* system it can, but
then I've got 3.5 megs of real memory plus the 67 meg disk).
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy            <david@ms.uky.edu>
<---- or:                {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<----
<---- Winter health warning:  Remember, don't eat the yellow snow!