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Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso
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READ.ME
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1989-04-21
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UNARC.EXE and CONVERT.EXE Ver 1.05
By Dave Harris
Requestable from 1:302/5 24hrs
I hereby place both these programs in the Public Domain. You may modify them
to your hearts content for your own usage. You may not turn around and sell
these programs and I would prefer that you not distribute modified versions.
If you make modifications that you feel other people would like then send me
a copy of the modified code and I *might* use them on future releases.
Constructive comments are always welcome. Net mail comments to 1:302/5.
Disclaimer: I in no way take responsiblity if this program does not work
on your system or causes damage to your files. I *strongly* recommend a
full backup before running the convert program on any of your download
directories.
UNARC:
------
This program allows you to unarchive any program(s) archived under SEAs, PKARC,
NoGate's PAK, PKs ZIP, ZOO, DWC, LHARC and any other archiver that will come
along. Make sure that the unarchivers are in your path somewhere.
It has been tested with the following.
PKUNZIP 0.90 <- 0.92 should also work
PAK 1.6
DWC 5.01
LHARC 1.00
ZOO 2.01
DOS 3.2 & 4.0
Added in version 1.05 is the UNARC.CFG file. It comes with one already built
that will handle the above mentioned formats. You can modify it for your
your own needs. It has the following format.
.EXT unarc method
.EXT unarc method
.
.
.
ie.
.ZIP PKUNZIP %s
.LZH LHARC x %s
You may have up to 20 unarchivers in the .CFG file, and the unarc method
can be up to 50 characters long. (Modify the program if you need it
larger)
The %s is where the filename will expand. Each line can only have one
%s though. Why %s you ask? Only a C programmer would see beauty behind
it.
Make sure the UNARC.CFG file is in your path somewhere.
Running it is way simple. Simply type
UNARC <filename>
and it will unarc it. It you leave the filename blank it will unarch the whole
directory (the files that are in archive format that is). So if you do like I
do and move one file off to a temporary area for testing, unarchive it, then
move it to the download area (given it is not hacked or a trojan), then just
typing UNARC at the temporary directory... Works like a charm. You can use
wildcards if you find the need to. Also, you do not have to specify the
extension if you are doing just one file. ie: UNARC ROUND42 will unarc it
no matter what format it is.
Note: This program is not clever enough to decide what format something
is in if it has been renamed with a different extension (and you
have not specified that extension in the .CFG file). I leave
that for a future version.
CONVERT:
--------
Convert allows you to change your files from one format to another.
Originally the program was written to convert only to the new LHARC format,
but it has been beefed up to work from a user changeable .CFG file. At the
time this was written LHARC has beaten all the other archivers for size on
all the examples I have tryed with the exception of a 300K text file (OPUS.DOC)
in which PAK (1.6) beat it by a miserable 400 bytes.
It is one heckova nice program in my opinion. As an example of how much better
it is the file MORIA.PAK which was 244K was reduced to 200K when converted to
LHARC. It is as much better than PAK, as PAK was over SEAs. It even saves
a surprising amount over PKZIP.
The same applies for CONVERT as did UNARC (ie. have the files in your path,
and versions, and no renamed files). UNARC and CONVERT are very similar
programs. If one fails to work the other probably will too. In addition,
Convert needs RED (redirect) to work. RED works like MOVE. I couldn't find
MOVE so use this for the moment, or modify the code to use MOVE instead.
Convert works off the CONVERT.CFG file. Once again make sure this file is
is your path somewhere. The CONVERT.CFG works much the same as the UNARC.CFG
with the difference of the U and A options that are in front. The U option
specifies that this is an unarcing method and the A specifies a rearching
method. Note that you can have more that one rearcing method. This is
useful for benchmarking a number of archivers are the same file(s). I
included the CONVERT.CFG file that I am using. It should be pretty straight
forward to modify if you need to.
CAUTION: Don't be foolish. Back your files up. If this fails for some
reason, it does have the potential to erase your directory.
Also, One person lost some files because he was running it in
a DDOS partition with not enough memory. If you do not have
enough memory you will lose your files. I ran some tests and
it starts to die when you have less than 250K. PAK and ZIP
have unarching thresholds about 50K less than this. To be safe,
don't run it under Double Dos or in a partition with less than
300 K. Make a temporary directory and copy a few archived
files over to it and try CONVERT on that temporary directory
before you try it on the real thing.
Other than that. Simply type
CONVERT <filename>
in the directory you want it to work on. Don't specify a drive and/or directory
you are not currently in.. This will not work. If you leave it blank it will
convert the whole directory. Wildcards are allowed if you wanted to convert
only part of your directory. It will convert only files with the extensions
you specified in the .CFG file and won't fiddle with your .EXE and other files.
If your directory(s) are large, plan on it taking a while, even on a faster
machine. It took me a good 4 hours on a 20MHZ 286 to do about 65 Megs worth
of converting...
Revision History:
-----------------
1.00 first version... Hard wired to do only the big 6.
1.01 Added the .CFG file: Never made it to the public though
1.05 Fixed it so it would search the path for the .CFG files if it
didn't find them in the current directory.
Fixed the bug of specifying a file without an extension.
ie UNARC ROUND42 didn't work but does now.
Made modifications to the code such that it accessed the directory
directly rather than dumping it to a file and parsing it. This
should be a safer way of doing things.
Next version:
-------------
I will attempt to make an option in UNARC (and CONVERT I guess) that will
look at files and try to tell what format they are in and then procede
with that information. I suspect this sort of thing will need to be hard-
wired though.
A before and after type of summary giving how much room you saved in the
CONVERT program.
An option to recursively unarc the programs.
An option to specify an alternate .CFG file
A View option that will let you specify Contents or let you actually look at a
document File inside the archived file.
A way to conserve the date and time in the CONVERT program. Still looking
for a way to do this one..