[comp.text.tex] Extraction of TeX from labrea

monson@diablo.amd.com (Steve Monson) (12/08/90)

Ahem. I am trying to retrieve TeX from labrea, and am having some problems
with the reconstruction of the tar files. Perhaps one of you more experienced
TeX'ers can tell me where I am going wrong. Our site doesn't have ftp
connections, so I am going through Stanford's BITFTP.

I am trying to retrieve TeX 3.0 from its site, and it has a bunch of tar
files that I have to copy. They are named (for example):

		 bubba.tar.Zaa
		 bubba.tar.Zab
		 bubba.tar.Zac

Here is what I am doing. Each tar file is apparently quite large, and I get
a whole passel of files from BITFTP:

		 bubba.tar.Zaa (part 1 of 12)
			      .
			      .
			      .
		 bubba.tar.Zaa (part 12 of 12)
		 bubba.tar.Zab (part 1 of 8)
                              .
			      .
			      .
		 bubba.tar.Zab (part 8 of 8)
		 etc.

Now, I am doing the following:

		 extract all files from my mailbox
		 strip off the mail header and null last line of each file

		 cat bubba.tar.Zaa.n (all in order) >bubba.tar.Zaa
		 cat bubba.tar.Zab.n (all in order) >bubba.tar.Zab
                 etc.

		 uudecode bubba.tar.Zaa (which produces BUBBA.TARZAA)
		 uudecode bubba.tar.Zab (which produces BUBBA.TARZAB)
		 etc.

		 cat BUBBA.TARZ* >BUBBA.tar.Z
		 uncompress -c BUBBA.tar.Z >bubba.tar
		 tar -xvf bubba.tar

Files with more than one .Z?? part seem to have trouble being uncompressed.
I was going to say "without fail" but one did decompress successfully, only
to have tar get a directory checksum error.

I tried uncompressing BUBBA.TARZAA and it worked ok. I tried

                 cat BUBBA.TARZAA BUBBA.TARZAB | uncompress

and I get the "corrupted input" message. If it hadn't been for the one two-part
file which uncompressed successfully, I would guess that my method of building
the files was wrong, as merging the ZAA and ZAB files always failed otherwise.
In short, am I way off base in assuming that

1. The parts of files from BITFTP need to be merged, then
2. each combined file separately uudecoded, then
3. the set of Z?? files strung together and uncompressed, then
4. the resulting tar file extracted?

Or should I try to uncompress them separately and then cat the resulting files
to make the tar file? (That is, switch steps 3 & 4.) (Actually, I just tried
that, and part2... "is not in compressed format".)

Steve
--
Life is a metaphor.