Re: UNIX Compressed Files From A PC

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@acm.org>]

E. Robert Tisdale wrote:
> I suspect that you've been sent on a fool's errand.
> The right way to do this is to write a UNIX shell script
> which pipes the output from uncompress to a remote process on the NT
> which filters the  uncompressed data then pipes it back to compress on UNIX.
> I think you could do the whole thing with a single UNIX command
> on two or three lines in the shell script.
> Anyway, it's just the sort of assignment that an old UNIX programmer
> with a sick sense of humor would give to a cocky young Windows programmer
> to teach him a little something about UNIX and, of course, humility;-)

I wish I were young - and a Windows programmer :-) Humility is not my
strong suit. It's hard to be humble when you're the best there is.

As I've said in a number of other posts: I cannot change the
requirement. The file *MAY-OR-MAY-NOT* live on a Unix box. Relying on
Unix to uncompress the file is NOT an option. The only thing I can count
on is that at some point in time, the file was compressed using the Unix
"compress" command (LZW algorithm, ".z" file format, whatever that
implies.) I cannot change the compression algorithm. I cannot rely on
the Unix operating system. I cannot use shell scripts or some other
stuff to unpack the file. I've got to *READ* the file in its compressed
format and get it decompressed on the fly.

This is not, in principle, a difficult thing to do - nor an uncommon
thing to do. Look at the Win32.LZExpand stuff provided by the
Win32ada/Win32api. Thats all I need. Just that - only for ".z" files
instead of Windows compressed files. As I understand it, Unix will just
do this for you automagically, when you open and start reading the file.
My only problem is an unsupported file format on Windoze. Why does it
seem that what I want to do is so unusual or oddball?

MDC
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