Ftp-WG: Compressions and conversions

At 02:03 AM 10/3/2002, you wrote:
>The .Z is ancient unix "compress" (LZ) compression.   .gz is gzip.

Winzip and several other tools handle .Z quite comfortably, ancient though 
it is.  Though I can remember back in the days of DOS that there wasn't 
enough memory to do 16-bit compression :-)

>Now munnari has more horsepower, and less work to do than it used to
>have, I will probably (eventually) enable decompress on the fly for
>these files, so you can just fetch without the ".Z" or ".gz" and you'd
>get the TXT version returned.   (I guess I could also make it do that
>if someone attempted an ACSII mode file transfer, but that might just
>violate the principle of least surprise, even if it would be more useful
>than just transferring a useless hunk of mangled data...)

It might be more appropriate to simply refuse to transfer such a file in 
ASCII mode.  To be honest, I've half-toyed with the idea of ignoring RFC 
959's requirement that the default transfer method be ASCII - but then 
again, on a Windows system, where the EOL translation is a null one, it's 
not terribly important.

It's about time that the MLST draft made it into RFC-hood, though.  I 
haven't seen any major changes in quite some time, and what changes I can 
remember have been well within the range of what normal RFC readers would 
have figured out for themselves.

Alun.
~~~~

--
Texas Imperial Software   | Try WFTPD, the Windows FTP Server. Find us at
1602 Harvest Moon Place   | http://www.wftpd.com or email [email protected]
Cedar Park TX 78613-1419  | VISA/MC accepted.  NT-based sites, be sure to
Fax/Voice +1(512)258-9858 | read details of WFTPD Pro for NT.