ekrimen@csuchico.edu (Ed Krimen) (10/05/90)
Is there anyway to unpack a datafile packed with PACK-ICE? -- ========================================================================== Ed Krimen - ekrimen@csuchico.edu - ||| SysOp, Fuji BBS 916-894-1261 Video Production Major ||| [ THIS SPACE AVAILABLE ] California State University, Chico / | \ [ LEAVE E-MAIL ]
jlong@radc.af.mil (Jeff Long) (10/10/90)
I have tried the newly posted Pack-Ice, and while it does seem to work very well, IT IS VERY SLOW! We are talking 30 minutes to pack WordPerfect! Still, it does do an excellent job, and has not balked at packing any program I give it. If anyone else has used this, is it my imagination, or does a pack-iced program take a tad longer to load and run than the same program packed with packer? Is it the unpacking header that takes longer since this program seems to do a more complete compression of the executable? -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Capt Jeff Long longj@lonex.radc.af.mil | | Rome Air Development Center (315) 330-7751 | | Communications Networking Branch (DSN) 587-7751 |
jeroen@plato.phil.ruu.nl (Jeroen Scheerder) (10/11/90)
In article <jlong.655530367@cassiopeia>, jlong@radc.af.mil (Jeff Long) writes: |>I have tried the newly posted Pack-Ice, and while it does seem to work |>very well, IT IS VERY SLOW! We are talking 30 minutes to pack WordPerfect! |>Still, it does do an excellent job, and has not balked at packing any program |>I give it. |> |>If anyone else has used this, is it my imagination, or does a pack-iced |>program take a tad longer to load and run than the same program packed with |>packer? Is it the unpacking header that takes longer since this program seemsople complete compression of the executable? I have compared two packers recently, pack-ice and pfxpack: yes, pack-ice is *SLread about 90 minutes...). That would not be too bad if only it were sufficiently fast at runtime unpacking the program: again, gcc_cc1 takes about 2ot t unpack. The average packing rate I have experienced with pack-ice is about 50-60%. This comp good. pfxpack took 'only' about 10 minutes to pack gcc_cc1; runtime unpacking is only (tops). The compression rate is about 50% on average, only slightly worse than pack-ice. Now if only pack-ice would allow UNPACKING the programs it packs, it would still keep pack-iced programs as working backups; but I have not yet found a way to unpack pack-iced things. Irritating too is pack-ices habit of always writing the compressed program over the original, and, since there is no way of restoring the original from the compressed program, this may be desastrous if you're not thoughtful enough alway before you run pack-ice. pfxpack can unpack its compressed programs; it will not try to compress programs compressed; it allows to write the compressed program to a different file. Furthermore, pfxpacked programs are even supposed to be extractable by lharc (although I have not tried this, since pfxpack does this quite well itself people to use pfxpack instead of pack_ice, until pack-ice speeds up and is changed to make restorable compressed programs. One last remark: Calamus will give you nasty messages if it is compressed It will tell you the program is probably infected by a virus, since the program length has changed, and it will tel you it is probably infected by a virus, since the program header has changed (this one you also get if you set the fastload bit in the program header ... tsk, tsk). Hope to have been of any help, J.
carlos@stretch.cs.mun.ca (Carlos Borges) (10/15/90)
What's the purpose in packing data files with PACK-ICE? How do you un-pack them? Am I missing something? -- Carlos (Miguel) Borges | "My name is Ozymandias, kind of kings: carlos@stretch.cs.mun.ca | Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"