NSPARK

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

nspark - unpack Archimedes archives

SYNOPSIS

nspark [ options ] archive [ file ... ]

DESCRIPTION

The current version of nspark is 1.7.5

Nspark can unpack the specified Archimedes-format archive, list its contents or tests its integrity.

Nspark's main features are:

o Supports all archive methods used by !Spark 1 and 2. The old version didn't support "Squashing" and used to handle "Compressed" archives by using the UNIX uncompress program. The new version supports both these and has them built-in, allowing easier porting to other OS's.

o Supports ArcFS format archives.

o Supports Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC). The integrity of an archive can now be checked without having to unarchive it.

o Supports verbose option to allow archive file details to be displayed (time/date or exec/load address, size, type).

o Supports selective file unarchiving, so the whole archive needn't be unarchived if not all the files are wanted).

o Supports user-prompting before overwriting a file, allowing the user to either (1) overwrite the file, (2) overwrite all the files, (3) unarchive the file to a different name, or (4) not to unarchive the file at all.

o Supports file-stamping so the date and time of the file, when unarchived, matches the date and time it was archived (not 4.2BSD or SysV.2 as these systems lack vital library functions).

I have not included support for creating !Spark archives, and I am not really sure if I need to as: (1) !Spark for RISC OS is cheap (#5.99 from David Pilling), (2) !SparkPlug can unpack archives created with zip (which is available in source form for UNIX, VMS and MSDOS), and (3) it's a lot of work. Let me know what you think.

Options:

-x: Extract the given file, or all files if none are specified.
-u: Equivalent to -x.
-t: Test archive integrity by simulating extraction and checking the CRCs (Cyclic Redundancy Checks).
-l: List archive contents.
-q: Quiet. Displays less information when listing, testing or extracting.
-f: Force file overwrite if a file already exists with the same name as the one being extracted. If not using -f then you are prompted whether you want to overwrite the original, skip this file, give it a different name, or overwrite this and all others that already exist.
-s: No filestamp. Does not set the timestamp when extracting files.
-v: Verbose. Gives full details when listing or extracting archives.
-R: Retry if archive is corrupt. If a bad header is found then nspark will search the archive until another header if found, rather than giving up.
-L<name>: Set name of log file to name.
-T: Append file type to name, in the same way as Tar or NFS. For example Text files (filetype &FFF) have ,fff appended when extracted.
-C: Create lowercase filenames. Useful on machines where the case of filenames is significant (eg. UNIX), this option forces all extracted filenames to be lowercase.

BUGS

Filestamping is not supported under 4.2BSD or SysV2 (as no mktime(3) or timelocal(3) functions exist under these systems). To correct this I could write my own or port the one from 386BSD (save that for a rainy day).

Doesn't support MSDOS yet. Working on that.

If compiled with GCC (v1.42) it core dumps when trying to test (or unarchive ?) a corrupt archive file. This doesn't happen when compiled with the UNIX pcc.

NOTES

Nspark is in the public domain. It is currently being maintained by arb (arb@comp.lancs.ac.uk).

AUTHOR

Andy Duplain, BT Customer Systems, Brighton, UK. (duplain@btcs.bt.co.uk)

CONTRIBUTORS

Improvements from version 1.5, including ArcFS support, by Andrew Brooks (arb@compl.ancs.ac.uk).

Manual pages originally supplied by Duncan (m91dps@ecs.oxford.ac.uk).

Suggestions for improvement by Tom Tromey (tromey@busco.lanl.gov).

Windows NT support by Alun Jones (auj@aber.ac.uk).

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 05:26:21 GMT, February 14, 2023