Ftp-WG: Compressions and conversions

At 09:52 AM 10/3/2002, you wrote:
>I'm thinking Windows doesn't work out of the box with
>.Z and .gz, and can't be quickly & freely upgraded to
>cope.
>
>Is that wrong?
>
>Last I checked, Winzip was now even less free than it
>used to be?

http://www.winzip.com, click on "Download Evaluation Version" - I didn't 
see anything about it being any less free to try out - the nag screen is 
still there.  Maybe you mean it's more expensive if you do decide to 
register?  It's $29 - hardly "break the bank".

>Just now I tried renaming .Z and .gz to .zip, which in
>some versions of Windows invokes auto .zip handling
>... here Windows says "invalid or corrupt" archive.

Because it's not a .zip file.  Microsoft's handling of zip files is only 
for zip files.

>Last time I inflated .Z on Windows, I think I
>downloaded, in multiple steps involving multiple
>megabytes, a version of Cygwin, possibly over the
>19.2K line I had in the Grand Tetons.  I hear a thing
>termed Mingw is now more in vogue: we wouldn't want
>technique learned to be valid for an extended period
>of time, would we.

There's any number of uncompress tools available for Windows, both in GUIs 
(many zip, RAR, ACE, etc extractors will also handle other formats 
including Unix compress) and command lines - for instance, the GNUish 
project, and any number of DOS utilities found at archives such as Simtel, 
etc.  Presumably there's similar tools for other platforms.  But discussing 
how to find tools that you need is more appropriate on other forums than 
this one.

Alun.
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