chasm@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US (Charles Marslett) (07/09/89)
In article <3306@titan.camcon.co.uk>, igp@camcon.co.uk (Ian Phillipps) writes: > About the only advantage of ZOO for news postings over the best of the > PAK/ARC programs is its ability to deal with subdirectories. It has > other advantages in general use, but PKPAK is faster. These advantages really cause more trouble than they are worth: one recent posting (ZOO format) has five different documentation fils that differed only in the characters after the third one following the period (that meant I had to extract it 5 (FIVE!!) times before I got all the text and documentation in a readable form. If you have to use names that are not reasonably portable (sorry you Amiga and BSD fans) please try to make them truncate to unique 6-character base and 3-character extension fields (I think that covers everything from C64 DOS up). I also remember giving up once, because the file name was impossible to extract under MSDOS -- I wish I couldremember what the prblem was here. > -- > UUCP: igp@camcon.co.uk | Cambridge Consultants Ltd | Ian Phillipps > or: igp@camcon.uucp | Science Park, Milton Road |----------------- > Phone: +44 223 420024 | Cambridge CB4 4DW, England | =========================================================================== Charles Marslett STB Systems, Inc. <== Apply all standard disclaimers Wordmark Systems <== No disclaimers required -- that's just me chasm@attctc.dallas.tx.us
tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen) (07/09/89)
In article <8588@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US> chasm@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US (Charles Marslett) writes: [about ZOO (dis)advantages] > >I also remember giving up once, because the file name was impossible to >extract under MSDOS -- I wish I couldremember what the prblem was here. I've encountered the reverse problem, too: converting some stuff from arc to zoo failed because a file name had some character in it zoo couldn't cope with, something with 8th bit on I believe (seems zoo stripped the 8th bit off, then tried to access the file and complained it couldn't find it). The problem with names that aren't distinct in the target environment could be fixed by checking against duplicate names and (possibly as an option) appending or replacing last characters with numbers (say). -- Tapani Tarvainen BitNet: tarvainen@finjyu Internet: tarvainen@jylk.jyu.fi -- OR -- tarvaine@tukki.jyu.fi
dhw@itivax.iti.org (David H. West) (07/10/89)
In article <8588@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US> chasm@attctc.DALLAS.TX.US (Charles Marslett) writes: >I also remember giving up once, because the file name was impossible to >extract under MSDOS -- I wish I couldremember what the prblem was here. One otherwise excellent piece of public-domain software, developed under UNIX, contains files named aux.*. These are unable to exist under MSDOS, which regards aux (and apparently also aux.*) as a reserved name referring to the COM port. -David West dhw@itivax.iti.org {uunet,rutgers,ames}!sharkey!itivax!dhw COMPIS, Industrial Technology Institute, PO Box 1485, Ann Arbor, MI 48106