For my contribution to this esteemed column, how about a change from the norm?
The following Rave doesn't concern a must-have application or program you've never heard about, or at least it shouldn't. No, this article is intended as a kind of tribute to a set of programs, which I think it's long past time were given the credit they richly deserve. They're the unsung heroes of many an OS/2 computer, and certainly of every OS/2 computer with a modem. What else can I be talking about, but the good old Info-Zip archiving utilities?
Most PC users, of whichever platform (OS/2, DOS, Win, etc.), probably don't think much about zipping and unzipping files. It's a pretty unusual DOS/Win computer which doesn't have a copy of PKZIP/PKUNZIP lurking somewhere on the hard drive; indeed, it seems impossible to do without them these days. (For that matter, it must be equally unusual to find someone who has actually bothered to register the PKWare utilities, but the least said on that front, the better...)
OS/2 aficionados, however, have a bit of a problem as regards PKZIP/UNZIP. Granted, we can use the DOS version via a DOS session, but we want to preserve all our long filenames and such, and PKZip and DOS emulation don't recognise them. Whilst PKWare have ported their utilities to OS/2, the latest version hasn't kept up with those for other platforms. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a PKZIP/PKUNZIP 2.x for OS/2 yet--something of a problem, as most ZIP files at the major archives were produced using version 2.x, and thus require PKUNZIP 2.x to extract them. (I know whereof I speak, having tried the OS/2 PKUNZIP. It's not much fun receiving "what's this?" messages with every ZIP file you feed into the damn thing.)
All is not lost, however, thanks to a kind bunch of programmers going under the name Info-Zip. They've produced a ZIP-compatible suite of archiving utilities, specifically designed to be ported easily to the more "esoteric" platforms as well as common ones, and the OS/2 set is simply a must-have for any self-respecting Warper. If you've got them, bear with me, and if you haven't (say, if you're a recent convert from DOS/Windows and don't know what I'm on about), here's why I think they're worth a Rave column.
- They do a great job. I've heard the Info-Zip ZIP program can't quite match the compression ratio of PKZIP, but to be frank I can't tell the difference.
- They support OS/2-specific file features. A major drawback of the OS/2 PKZIP/UNZIP I tried was a lack of support for long filenames (at least, with the PMZIP front-end). With the Info-Zip archiver, you retain these and other EA-related information, so files on HPFS drives can be zipped without having to rename them, providing the receiving machine has an HPFS drive too.
- They have a wide range of utilities written for them. As the archiving suite of choice for the discerning OS/2 user there are more utilities to complement the Info-Zip set than for any other archiver. Scared by all those command-line options? Yup, me too--thankfully others realise this, hence the large number of GUI "front-end" apps available. (I'd recommend the shareware program RPF Zip Control, especially if you use the Presentation Manager without the WPS, but my personal top award has to go to Object Desktop's archive objects. They add new object classes to the WPS, representing ZIP and other archive formats as desktop folders--all archiving is done in the background, and you're hardly aware it's going on. Why did no-one think of this before?)
- They're free. The fact that Info-Zip put all this work into creating their ZIP/UNZIP suite, with all the above features, and then released it into the public domain for all us OS/2 users to pick up gratis, must make this one of the great philanthropic acts in the history of our fave OS. Considering that PKWare somehow feel justified in charging over $30 for their (IMHO) rather inferior equivalent, the latter ought to hang their heads in shame, or at the very least bring out PKZIP 2.04 for OS/2.
That's not to say Info-Zip has everything. I'm sure I'm not the only user who wishes the program could create and extract ZIPs spread across multiple floppies, and some kind of utility for creating self-extracting archives (e.g. ZIP2EXE) would prove a most welcome addition. But let's face it: these are minor quibbles. Info-Zip has given us a high-quality set of archivers, designed to take advantage of OS/2's special features, and isn't asking pots of moolah for it. If they're reading this, I'd like to say a huge thanks to the Info-Zip team, and I'm sure I don't speak alone.
Tim Walker is based near London, and works in electronic media (on-line and CD-ROM) for a major publisher of journals. He uses OS/2 at home, and hopes to have his own home page up before long.
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