[time-nuts] Administrivia -- List Archives (was "How a MicrostepperWorks")

John Ackermann N8UR jra at febo.com
Sat Mar 12 18:12:00 UTC 2005


Bill Hawkins wrote:

>John,
>
>I used Unix between 1983 and 1993, but now it is a withered skill
>that is not supported by any Unix operating system. I can download
>the .gz files, but I can't open them with WinZip. Is this a version
>problem, requiring a newer version of WinZip than 1998? Seems to me
>that WinZip could open a tar file, but there are none left here to
>test.
>  
>
The ".gz" suffix means "gzip" which is a compression scheme that 
replaces the old Unix "compress" utility.  By itself, it only compresses 
and doesn't create archives, so it's often used with the tar program to 
create a compressed archive with a ".tgz" ( or sometimes the 
DOS-unfriendly ".tar.gz") extension.

gzip executables for Windows (and DOS, and lots of other platforms) are 
available at http://www.gzip.org/#exe.  

Though I haven't downloaded any of the archives to double-check, I'm 
pretty sure that the list archives for each month are just a single text 
file that's been compressed, so just un-gzipping should be all you need 
and you don't need to worry about un-tarring the file afterwards.

 From a look at the WinZip support page, it looks like recent WinZip 
versions can extract .gz and .tgz files, but can't create them.

John




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