From: dsb@duke.cs.duke.edu (D. Scott Bigham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Zoo shells
Date: 18 Dec 92 03:08:41 GMT
Organization: n. Arrangement in an orderly or logical fashion.  See "miracle".

From the Holy Book of <1gmt2qINNgv@golem.wcc.govt.nz>
  as spake by sheppard_r@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz :

Sigh...  Remedial reading comprehension, Roger:

>>                                                         [...]  So I
>>consulted archie and found what was then probably the latest version,
>>LZH201I.LZH.               ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^

>THe latest version is LZH201L, Note: i is before l...

I know that, Roger.

And yes, I have recently obtained 2.01l.  I still can't read the online
help.  Or the instructions.  If it didn't use the same characters for
the basic commands (extract, list) as sensible archivers do, it would be
entirely unusable.

>There is a option in LZH201L for problems with incompatible headers,
>it  the   -k  option.

That doesn't help if you have an older version of lharc, Roger.  That's
my point.  Having to upgrade your archiver every few months just to be
able to unpack the files you're downloading is not my idea of a fun
time.  Or a good archiver.

>LZH201L will default to Directory extraction with out setting any options
>at all...

Nope, sorry.  I just tried.

[And so this post doesn't turn out entirely negative, I did eventually
figure out through trial and error (no thanks to the on-line help --
another area in which Zoo excels) that -x is the necessary option to
list/extract into subdirectories.  Which, again, Zoo does for you
automatically.]

>I pitty you, wee all don't live and breath Unix...

Actually, I pity you.  There is _tremendous_ power available in Unix and
the utilities that come with it.  Just recently, for instance, I took a
bunch of news articles I'd saved, stripped off the article headers (but
leaving in the important parts), renamed the files according to their
Subject: lines (as extracted from the files themselves), and stored them
away in the appropriate archive files.  With _one_ pipeline command.

>ZOO is not used here, may be its because wee are to Clean and Green..:-).??

Or perhaps because it's too advanced for you? ;)

And I notice you carefully sidestepped all of my strongest points.  Here
they are again:

>>Please explain to us, Roger, why a Unix ancestry automatically makes a
>>program rubbish.  Some of the most useful and powerful software on my
>>computer (LaTeX, tcsh, byacc, flex, indent [and GCC, but I don't actually
>>have that one ;) ]) were ported straight from Unix.

>>                                                    [...]  And when I
>>can't be certain that the archive I'm creating on this machine will
>>uncompress on another machine which has a subtly different version of
>>the archiver, I start to distrust that archiver.

And most important:

>>I tried every version of Lharc I owned, Roger.  _None_ of them would
>>unpack it.

Well?

						-sbigham
-- 
Scott Bigham                   | The opinions expressed above are
dsb@romeo.cs.duke.edu          | (c) 1992 Hacker Ltd. and cannot be
bigham@hercules.acpub.duke.edu | copied or distributed without a
    (but not for long)         | Darn Good Reason(tm).