This archive contains two folders. The UNTAR folder contains a quick and dirty utility that will extract tar files on the Mac. The COMPRESS folder contains a quick and dirty port of the Unix compress program.
UNTAR was written by me, Tim Smith, and is in the public domain. COMPRESS was *NOT* written by me. All I did was hack at this copy to make it compile and run under Think C. I think that there is a much better port available, too, so this one should only be used if you can't find that one.
These utilities are ugly, but they work sufficiently well to uncompress and untar the files on the first Prime Time Freeware CD-ROM, which is what I needed them for. I've tried untar with the tar on Ultrix, and that seems to work fine, too.
***** UNTAR FOLDER
The UNTAR folder contains the following files:
untar The UNTAR application.
untar.c The source for UNTAR.
untar.π The Think C project file for UNTAR.
untar.π.rsrc Resource file used to build UNTAR.
***** USING UNTAR
Operation of UNTAR is very simple. Put your tar file where you want to extract your files. Then run UNTAR. You use a standard file selection dialog to find your tar file. You are then given a choice to list the contents of the tar file, or to extract the files from it.
If directories are stored in the tar file, they will be created when you extract.
All extracted files are give type TEXT. The creator comes from the KIRK 128 resource. The dialog that asks if you want to list or extract lets you override the default creator if you want to.
Untar can either extract files "as is" or it can convert newline characters to carriage return characters. The default is to convert. There's a checkbox in the extract/list dialog that lets you control this.
Untar does a simple check on the file name of each file it encounters in the tar archive. If the file name contains any characters less than space or greater than 127, untar will warn you that the file you gave it may not be a tar archive, and will give you a chance to abort processing of it. If you elect to continue, untar will not warn you of any more weird file names encountered in that archive.
***** COMPRESS FOLDER
The COMPRESS folder contains the following files:
(compress.original) The compress distribution, untouched by me. This is
exactly as it appeared on the Prime Time Freeware
CD-ROM (except that it was a tar archive there, so
I ran it through untar to extract the files).
compress.c The file I hacked to work on the Mac. Diff this with
compress.c in (compress.original) to see what
changes I made.
compress The application.
compress.π The Think C project file to build compress.
***** USING COMPRESS
Launch the program. A dialog box appears. Type "-d" at the end of the text field at the bottom of the dialog (this tells compress that you want to decompress a file).
Then click the "file" option under the "Standard Input" heading. That will bring up a standard file dialog. Select the compressed file.
Click the "file" option under the "Standard Output" heading. That gives you another standard file dialog. Enter the name you want to give the uncompressed file.
When you are returned to the main dialog, press the OK button, and the file will be decompressed.
***** WARNING
This compress port is a quick hack. I basically did just the following:
o Deleted anything that didn't compile right away that wasn't needed to decompress the compressesed tar archives on the Prime Time Freeware CD-ROM.
o Changed a bunch of big static tables to be big dynamically allocated tables, to get around Think C's limits on the size of initialized data.
o Made it use Think C's console interface.
Note that I did not do anything to make it know about Mac files. It will completely ignore the resource fork of any file it is given. *DO* *NOT* *USE* *THIS* *PORT* *TO* *COMPRESS* *MAC* *FILES*. Only use it to uncompress data files from your Unix machine.
