Rev. 8/9/96 RG
In order to save storage space and improve file transmission, many of the files on the Autox.Team.Net FTP server are compressed or encoded with various standard, freeware, and shareware utilities. Sources for these utilities include bulletin boards, internet archive servers, and others. On the internet, SIMTEL and CICA (ftp.cica.indiana.edu) are central FTP archive with mirror servers, such as OAK.oakland.edu, and many others.
All files ending in .Z are compressed using UNIX compress. They can be restored uning uncompress or zcat. Transfer in Binary mode.
MacCompress 3.2 is available on Oak.oakland.edu in the pub\mac\ folder. (Anyone know where 3.4 comes from?)
GZIP is available on Oak.oakland.edu in the pub\msdos\compress directory.
Files ending in .zip and .exe are PKZIP compressed (originally for the PC). PKZip has become very common, with program versions available for DOS, Windows, Mac and Unix and more, and is now built into several popular file managers. The PKZip for DOS package even includes a utility to convert a zipped file to a self-extracting .exe file, so the end user doesn't need pkunzip to extract their files.
PKZIP is available on OAK.oakland.edu in the pub\msdos\zip directory. Un-Zipers are also available for Mac and UNIX.
-These files are all graphics images which can be viewed using a viewer program for your machine. There are many available on public servers. GIF is preferred, as it is very common, and provides the smallest file sizes. JPEG files are usually bigger, but have more detail.
These encoding methods are used to make binary files such as programs, graphic images, and compressed files transmittable as ascii text, which allows these files to be sent through electronic mail. Many mail programs on Mac's, PC's, and UNIX are now including uuencoding/decoding as a pushbutton or automatic feature. Standalone programs are also available from various public program archives. While these methods are not used on the Team.Net server, you may find them useful to send files to someone else through E-Mail.
File archival and retrieval utilities for VMS users are available via ftp from ftp.spc.edu. The AAAREADME.TXT (ascii) and UNZIP.EXE (binary) files should be grabbed from the directory [ANONYMOUS.MACRO32]. The following zipped files from [ANONYMOUS.MACRO32.SAVESETS] will be helpful:
These archives on ftp.spc.edu are zipped VMS BACKUP save-sets; that is they must be unzipped, then the files extracted with VMS BACKUP. The .ZIP files and the UNZIP.EXE file should be transferred with an FTP file type of BINARY FIXED 512.
This page is maintained by Roger Garnett. Please send comments & errors to rwg@autox.team.net
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