roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (01/11/90)
This is only marginally related to tcp-ip, but I couldn't think of a
better place, so here goes. I'm setting up an anonymous ftp server to
distribute various bits of software. Much of it will be in the form of (L-Z)
compressed tar files. I expect the majority of the people using the server
will have Unix, but not all and I don't want to needlessly shut out those who
don't. So, my question is, how universal is this format? Are there readily
available programs for VMS, Macintosh, MS-DOS, etc, that can read tar.Z
files? Is there some other more universal format I should consider?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"DOUG@YSUB.BITNET ("Doug Sewell") (01/11/90)
There are MSDOS versions of Compress and Tar. I can't speak for other operating systems. An alternative you might consider is 'ZOO' by Rahul Deszi. This is similar to ARC, ZIP, and many other common PC bundle-and-compress programs, but has been ported to Unix, MSDOS, AmigaDos, VM/SP, VMS, and I-don't-know how many other environments. If I remember cor- rectly, one of the requirements for implementations of ZOO (source in C is available from SIMTEL20) is that files must be compatible across all implementation platforms. Doug