Re: WZZIP on IFS -- MIDRANGE-L

I knew that gz and zip files are not interchangeable - probably did not explain well enough. And, with my tendency to range a bit, I brought in gzip in the first place - mea culpa.

Info-Zip certainly looks interesting - it'd be nice if there's an AIX executable I could just install - haven't gone to look, no time yet.

I have gone to jar, as I said, mainly because of size restrictions. In the application where I'm using it, I did not want to archive multiple files, so gzip worked fine until I got files that it could not handle.

Regards
Vern

At 07:23 PM 3/31/2004 -0600, you wrote:

> Better than the gzip utility available from IBM for QShell. Allows for
> larger objects, too. And multiple objects into a single archive.

Hmm... the original question was asking if we had gotten WinZip working or
if not, what did we use for ZIP files.  Gzip doesn't create ZIP files, it
creates gzipped (.GZ) files.

Also, Gzip isn't designed for archiving.. it's purely a compression
program.  That's why you can't have multiple files.  It's typically used in
conjunction with the Unix tar utility.   Tar creates an archive, and gzip
compresses it.  It's more modular that way, you can use one without the other
when the occasion calls for it.

On my FreeBSD system, having the two programs tar/gzip running
together performs better than WinZip does on the same machine.  Unixes
like FreeBSD, though, are optimized for that sort of work.  OS/400 is
not, and tar/gzip isn't likely as efficient on iSeries as it is on Unix
machines.   Though, due to the awful overhead of Java, JAR may be worse.
Never compared them, since .ZIP and .TAR.GZ aren't interchangable :)

There's also Info-Zip which is an Open Source implementation of PKZIP.
The AIX version should run in PASE on the iSeries, and it would most
likely outperform JAR.

Of course, you could try to make an OS/400-native port of Info-Zip, and
that would almost definitely outperform anything else, but would require
you to spend the time, etc, porting it...

Info-Zip is here: http://www.info-zip.org

I haven't tried making Info-Zip run on OS/400, mind you, but it's the
program that I use for .ZIP files on my FreeBSD systems, and it certainly
outperforms JAR there...