Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: "Carlos E. R." Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Zip list Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2023 20:59:19 +0100 Lines: 51 Message-ID: References: <0LqcnRugEt7aNnL-nZ2dnZfqnPGdnZ2d@giganews.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net n+MJUga4n1A69E8gNYy3vAzndjKlYImF1rmY8V4lXV1JwFJcbx Cancel-Lock: sha1:yZPcAvzpSwKmB5wwseFP9QRLBkw= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.7.1 Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:37087 On 2023-02-17 20:32, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > On 2023-02-17, Carlos E. R. wrote: >> On 2023-02-17 17:28, Robert Heller wrote: >> >>> Zip / Unzip have a bit of a history and came from outside of the UNIX world >>> (they originated in the MS-DOS world). I suspect that due to MS-DOS memory / >>> disk limitations the *original* programs for Zip files had to be limited to >>> single functions (just building the zip file, just extracting, just listing, >>> etc.). Along with a different philosophy about how to organize software. >> >> Er... that's not my remembrance. I recall a single program, called >> "pkzip". Maybe there was an older zip/unzip, but what we used before >> pkzip was another format, arc. > > I recall there being two separate programs, PKZIP.EXE and PKUNZIP.EXE. > In fact, I just dug around on my system and found them both. They're > dated 1993-02-01. > >> > > Note that the label on the floppy disk in the photo mentions > both PKZIP and PKUNZIP. Ah. My memory must be wrong, then. > > That's not to say that there wasn't a later version of PKZIP > that could both zip and unzip, but I never saw one. > > I was becoming so tired of the proliferation of file archiving > formats (ARC, ZOO, ARJ, etc.) that I was relieved to see the > world finally settle on ZIP as a standard archiving format. > (Uh-oh, here comes 7Zip...) > > And this is all separate from the Unix world, which had > tar, cpio, gzip... I don't know about Unix, but I found the capabilities in Linux more limited than in Dos, around 1998. For example, I could not write an archive spanning several floppies, because zip could not break on an exact byte count. It had to break on complete files. On the other hand, "less" could handle gzipped text files transparently, no need to decompress for reading. Very nice for log files. -- Cheers, Carlos E.R.