Re: [Zutils-bug] Decompressing any file

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Ole, :-)

Ole Tange wrote:
> I have just been alerted to Zutils today. From the man page I cannot
> see if you use the parallelized versions of the decompressors (pbzip2
> and plzip).

Zutils currently only uses the "standard" (single-threaded) 
decompressors. As I don't like the idea of using only the parallelized 
versions of the decompressors, (among other things they are less 
portable and consume more resources), I guess some kind of configuration 
will be needed to support them. I am open to suggestions about this. ;-)


> Also it would be nice if Zutils supported zip and 7z (see the attached
> zzcat on how that can be done).

IIRC neither zip nor 7zip support stdin. I see zzcat uses a temporary 
file, which can create a lot of trouble, ranging from full-disk errors 
to perhaps non-graceful terminations similar to this[1].
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2010-02/msg00006.html

It seems to me that supporting zip and 7z would make impossible zutils' 
goal of decompressing on the fly without temporary files.

Also 7zip is a windows-only program, and it seems there are problems 
porting zutils to windows because of buggy support for named pipes on 
Cygwin. I think mixing posix and windows programs is not a good idea.


Best regards,
Antonio.