S00100@DBNRHRZ1.BITNET ("Gisbert W.Selke") (06/14/91)
I have uploaded to SIMTEL20: pd1:<msdos.filutl> EXTAR10.ZIP Simple TAR unpacker; w/Unix to DOS name conver. Extract from the documentation: Occasionally, one gets a Unix TAR on an MS-DOS machine and would like to extract some, or all, of its members; and in fact, there are a number of programmes around that list TAR contents, extract from them and even build new ones. So far, so good; but they -- at least the ones I have encountered so far -- don't cater for file names which are perfectly valid under Unix but are illegal under MS-DOS. E.g., file names could contain multiple periods, start with a period, or contain all sorts of nasty characters that are interpreted as delimiters by DOS or are not permitted for some reason or other. Trying to extract those files will just fail. Also, Unix file names are case-sensitive -- hence, a TAR might contain read.me and READ.ME (and possibly Read.Me). For DOS, these all look the same; hence, extracting one of them will overwrite the others that have the 'same' name. Hence I wrote ExTAR, which is a very crude, no-frills utility with one purpose only: extract all members of a TAR, creating directories as necessary, and renaming files to make them acceptable to DOS; all the time taking care not to overwrite any existing files. It does so by truncating names and converting offending ones to nice ones. ExTAR does not do any of the fine things the other TAR processors do; in particular, it does no listing of contents and no error checking. Also, since I don't have any official documentation of the TAR format, I may have overlooked certain special features embedded into some... I don't know, and frankly, I don't care too much. So let's leave it this way: this is free software, supplied as-is, no guarantees for anything. Source (TurboPascal 5.5+) is provided; if it doesn't suit your needs, feel free to hack it. TapirSoft Gisbert W.Selke <s00100@dbnrhrz1.bitnet> Ermekeilstrasse 28 D-5300 Bonn 1 Germany