the Rave- by Tim Walker

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.

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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