monty@sagpd1.UUCP (Monty Saine) (03/07/89)
Have the binaries/sources gone silent or is my feed out again. I really wish there was somekind of cron driven posting from Bob to let the net know he is just busy and not dead. I think he is doing a great job. I do have a flaky feed and can never be sure. Sorry for the extra bandwidth just wondering. Monty
page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (03/07/89)
monty@sagpd1.UUCP (Monty Saine) wrote: >I wish there was somekind of cron driven posting from Bob >to let the net know he is just busy and not dead. I was busy and almost dead. I am less busy in some respects now; mostly in the respect that you care about. I am still almost dead. In fact many people at ULowell these days are convinced I have but a few weeks to live, but I'll tell you that story some other time. I just set up a cron-driven monthly posting mechanism that will tell you what was posted in the last month, how to get stuff from the archives, and instructions on how to use the stuff posted to comp.binaries.amiga. Enclosed are those instructions. Sorry for the long silence. ..Bob ----- How To Use The Comp.Binaries.Amiga Postings - last update 6-Mar-89 Every comp.binaries.amiga submission is archived with the ZOO archive program, which does a fair amount of data compression and retains the original names, dates and directory structure within the archive. Because Usenet data paths are not 8-bit, these archives must be encoded to "regular ASCII" which is 7-bit. The encoding is done with a program called 'uuencode'. The version used adds a checksum at the end of each line, and includes the file size at the end of the encoding. Sometimes the files are too large for one posting (Usenet postings should generally be less than 64k bytes but you can sometimes get away with longer postings). If this uuencoded zoo archive is too large, it gets split into pieces, roughly 64k in length. Finally, the (possibly split) .zuu files are enclosed by some simple UNIX commands. This 'shell archive' is commonly known as a 'shar'. There is a more-or-less standard set of file extensions used to show the file type. The file extension is the set of characters after the dot (or period) in the name. The set of file extensions used is: .zoo An archive file in ZOO format .zuu A .zoo file that's been uuencoded .zu1 The first file in a split .zuu file .zu9 The ninth file in a split .zuu file .zu10 The tenth file in a split .zuu file .uu1 The first shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu .uu9 The ninth shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu .uu10 The tenth shar file in a (possibly split) .zuu To get all this back into a usable form, you need to: 1. Unpack the files from the shar format (the verb is usually called 'unshar'). You can either use a standard text editor to remove the info, or the unix 'sh' (Bourne Shell), or a publicly available tool to do it for you. With some tools (like 'sh'), you are required to remove the Usenet header information first; other unshar tools will remove it for you. Once you unshar a .uu? file, you'll have a .zu? file. 2. Combine all the .zu? pieces into a large .zuu file. You should use something like 'cat' under UNIX or 'join' under AmigaDOS. It is important that you combine the pieces in numerical order. Be aware that the single digit pieces do not have a leading zero, so a wildcard sort will probably not do what you want. Instead, you should specify the files in this way: zu? zu??, which will do the single digit files first, then the double digits. You can rest assured there will not be any triple-digit postings. 3. Convert the .zuu file to a .zoo file with the 'uudecode' program. If you have a version of uudecode that understands the checksum and file size information, you should use it. If you don't, you can still use the old uudecode program, but you will not know if the file has somehow become corrupt. 4. You now have a .zoo file. To extract the files into a directory, you need a program called 'zoo'. After "un-zoo'ing", most submissions will have some documentation to tell how to set up and run the software on your Amiga. --------- Of course you need to get the program(s) to your Amiga to run them. Usually this means downloading the software to your Amiga through a terminal program. If you want to download the files as quickly as possible to your Amiga, you should do steps 1-3 above on your UNIX machine and download the .zoo file to your Amiga, since the .zoo file is the smallest of the files. It's also usually faster and easier to do steps 1-3 on the UNIX machine because you have less worry about disk and memory limitations. However, some terminal emulators available for the Amiga do not handle binary downloads well. Experiment with yours and see. If you have trouble, you might try a different protocol or different terminal program. If all else fails, you can download the .zuu file, which is an ascii file, and do the uudecode on your Amiga. The mechanics of terminal programs, protocols and downloading are beyond the scope of this document. Most terminal programs should have a manual section describing how to log in and do remote downloads. --------- Here are the tools you need, under UNIX, AmigaDOS, or both. All are publicly available; you do not need to purchase anything to make use of the software that comes across in comp.binaries.amiga. shar, sh, unshar - a tool to unpack the shell archives, or use an editor cat or join - to append the split .zu? files to one .zuu file uudecode - to decode the .zuu file to a .zoo file zoo - to unpack the ZOO archive. -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page Have five nice days.
darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) (03/08/89)
Unshar'ing and uudecoding on the UNIX side is fine. If you're on a VMS machine, it can cause problems. (I use the VMS machine because it has a 2400baud modem) Even though I have uudecode and unshar on my VMS machine, the zoo file will not survive intact. This is because a record format and record size are enforced on the zoo file just created from uudecode. If you happen to use a version of kermit, xmodem, etc that exactly reverses these changes, then you are ok. However, the most popular terminal programs do not do this. So your best bet is to transfer the .zuu file to your Amiga and decode it there (you can also send the shar file). This doesn't sound worth mentioning, but I have known a few people who have wasted evenings retrying the download and eventually giving up on the program and hoping that it will show up on a Fish disk. Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com) Can you "Spot the Looney"?
Bru@cup.portal.com (Bruce Edward Bettis) (03/08/89)
Err, Bob, how much trouble would it be to build filenames with leading zeros in the sequence number part? This would greatly simply catenating multi-piece .zuu files, would it not? (or am I missing something?) Other than that, I think the packaging is tops.. thanks! --Bruce No signature file. Yecch, how I hate menus.
page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (03/11/89)
>trouble [...] to build filenames with leading zeros in the sequence number? No trouble at all. >This would greatly simply catenating multi-piece .zuu files, would it not? I don't see that the difference between typing ".zu? .zu??" and ".zu??" could be considered "greatly simplifiying" ... do you just like leading zeros? Heck, it's no trouble to me. How about a short poll? Tell me how much better the world will be if I add leading zeros. Send me mail, don't post. If you can't mail to me, DON'T post; this is an informal poll and I don't need to hear from everybody. If I should add zeros should I add - one, two, three ... ? And if you can shed further light on this "great simplification" I'd be willing to hear about it. Your humble servant - ..Bob -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page Have five nice days.
mjl@ut-emx.UUCP (Maurice LeBrun) (03/12/89)
In article <464@laic.UUCP> darin@nova.UUCP (Darin Johnson) writes: >Unshar'ing and uudecoding on the UNIX side is fine. If you're on a >VMS machine, it can cause problems. (I use the VMS machine because it >has a 2400baud modem) Even though I have uudecode and unshar on my >VMS machine, the zoo file will not survive intact. This is because >a record format and record size are enforced on the zoo file just >created from uudecode. If you happen to use a version of kermit, >xmodem, etc that exactly reverses these changes, then you are ok. >However, the most popular terminal programs do not do this. UUdecode writes out the file as record type STREAM_LF in VMS. This is Dec's version of a vanilla binary file. Unfortunately, most file transfer utilities (ftp binary, kermit, xmodem..) need it to be in 512 byte fixed record format. The solution is to run the file through a conversion routine, called 'bilf', that is included with zoo (which *does* run on vms). I do all my unshar'ing and uudecoding on the vax, as it saves download time. And with zoo there, I can check on the archive's integrity as well. BTW, I think I got zoo & bilf via anonymous ftp from j.cc.purdue.edu from the /comp.sources.unix (?) archive. Maurice LeBrun | "So then I says to Borg, `You know, Institute for Fusion Studies | as long as we're under siege, one of us University of Texas at Austin | oughta moon these Saxon dogs.'" Internet: | mjl@fusion.ph.utexas.edu | (Far Side)
Bru@cup.portal.com (Bruce Edward Bettis) (03/13/89)
Oh, ok, here's more light... I'm usually reassembling things on VMS which sorts things alphabetically so anything with more than 9 parts would get concatenated out of order. (i.e. .zu1,.zu10,.zu2, etc.) This isn't fatal, it would just be easier with a leading zero or two, namespace permitting, (and if it doesn't break anything else, of course...) --Bruce