kwok@iris.ucdavis.edu (Conrad Kwok) (11/15/87)
I saw several questions about the ARC program. Someone ask: > Why people use arc rather than compress? ... What is the origin of > arc. (the question is not exactly as above but similar) The difference in size of most of the output from different compression programs (Arc/Zoo/Compress/pkarc) are within 5%. I think the reason people choose Arc/Zoo.pkarc is because it can combine several program into one and you may selectively extract some or all files from the archived file. Compress lacks this features. Furthermore, Arc/pkarc is almost an standard archive software in the PC world. Personally, I prefer pkarc on PC because of its speed and I prefer Zoo on unix because it can handle directory, long file name and it is compatible with the PC version so that I may transfer the archive program between unix and my PC. When we compare the speed of the programs on unix, compress is about 5 times faster than arc and it is about 2 times faster than zoo. That is why I do not choose arc to use on unix to store my personal files. I think the origin of Arc is from LBR and squeeze. LBR is a program to collect several programs together without compression. It is very common in the CP/M-80 era. Squeeze is another compression program using Huffman coding. Actually arc does not do compression initially. (I think the initial version is by System Enhancement Association as a shareware.) Now we have a lot of arc compatible programs such as pkarc and ARCE. Arc has been implemented on many system including bsd4.2 and sysV. The sources are available on simtel20 in the directory pd:<unix.arc-lbr> But some reason, I cannot access to the pd:<unix-****> directory in the last week. Moreover, I think the sources have been posted before so you may look at the archive files of Comp.sources.????. If you still cannot find it, I may e-mail the sources to you. Remark: The bsd42 version of arc also works on bsd43 and ultrix. -- Conrad internet: kwok@iris.ucdavis.edu csnet: kwok@ucd.csnet csnet: kwok%iris.ucdavis.edu@csnet.relay uucp: {lll-lcc, ucbvax ...}!ucdavis!iris!kwok
cclin@brillig (Chih-Chen Lin) (11/16/87)
In article <490@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> kwok@iris.UUCP (Conrad Kwok) writes: >The sources are available on simtel20 in the directory >pd:<unix.arc-lbr> But some reason, I cannot access to the >pd:<unix-****> directory in the last week. Moreover, I think the ^^^^^^ I don't know when or why, but pd:<unix.****> has been moved to pd2:<unix.****> Chih-Chen