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Text File | 1991-08-24 | 13.2 KB | 380 lines

GEN - The archive generator --------------------------- (c) Wolfgang Thronicke & Friedrich Wichmann 1990-1991 Manual for Version 0.12 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- GEN is public domain. No charge has to be paid for it. Copy and distribute it as you like but keep the files of the distribution intact. We, the authors, are not liable for any damage resulting from the use of this program. Enjoy! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS -------- 0. Introduction 1. Requirements and installation 2. Usage 3. Examples 4. How GEN works 5. Problems & Solutions 6. How to contact the authors 7. References 0. INTRODUCTION --------------- What is GEN? GEN is a small tool to create multiple archives with the most common compression tools for PCs. The basic aim of this program is to build archives with a given maximum size from a collection of files. Suppose you have installed a complex multi-file tool (as most compilers are!) and want to make a backup so that you can restore the installed tool any time you want. And you want to use your favorite compression tool to save space. But most of them are not capable of making multiple archives with a specified size. Does this sound somewhat familiar to you? Yes, you're right. There has been a tool called ZIPPER that was released in 1990 to the public. GEN is an enhanced version of this program. We changed the name because GEN is not limited to use only one archiver but GENerates archives using the most widespread archivers. Most bugs of the old ZIPPER release have been removed and some new features have been added. GENs features: ■ create multiple archives with a restricted size ■ can use different archiving programs ■ the same options for different archivers ■ autodetect of availiable archivers ■ steps through subdirectories (or not) ■ can behave like BACKUP ■ shell to DOS capability ■ diskmode to speed up archive creation on disks ■ requires less memory than ZIPPER ■ faster than ZIPPER ■ less bugs (hope so) 1. REQUIREMENTS & INSTALLATION ------------------------------ This is all you need to use GEN: ■ an IBM compatible computer (PC/XT/AT) ■ PC-DOS or MS-DOS (preferrable >= Version 3.0) ■ at least 512k main memory This is all you have to do to use GEN: ■ copy GEN.EXE to any place you like (except NUL) ■ if you want to call GEN without issuing the complete path where it resides, adjust your PATH variable ■ make sure that the archivers you want to use are located in directories that can be found in the PATH environment variable ■ execute GEN.EXE with appropriate options 2. USAGE -------- Usually GEN starts collecting files for the archives in the directory where it is invoked. This makes it very simple to handle a complete structure of subdirectories starting from a base directory. However, you can control this by special options. IMPORTANT: Please remember to supply enough space for the archives! You must at least have twice the space of the archive at the location where the archive is created! This is due to the philosophy used in most of the archiver programs that create a temporary file before updating an archive. Use the option -t<path> or the environment variable TMP to select an directory for the temporary archive file if the space is too small. For directly archiving to floppy disks please use the -d option (see below). General call: GEN called without parameters gives a short summary of options and supported archivers. GEN <arcspec> [options]* <arcname> arcspec : The type of the archive. This is usually the suffix of the archives, e.g. "lzh" for using LHARC or LHA. This parameter !must! be given to gen. List of currently supported archivers: lzh -> LHA 2.11 or LHARC 1.13 ( if both are availiable LHA is used) zip -> PKZIP 1.10 zoo -> ZOO 2.1 (for 2.01 see ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES ->) arj -> ARJ 2.00 arc -> ARC 6.02 Other versions of these archivers will work if they have the same options as the ones in the list. IMPORTANT: For ZOO 2.01 set environment variable ZOOLOW, because the old zoo version does not recognize the high compression option flag for zoo used by GEN by default. arcname : arcname is a filename specification that denotes the location where the archives will be stored. The filename can be an arbitrary MS-DOS file specification with the restriction that the name part of the file is only 5 characters long and has no suffix e.g.: d:\archiv\demo stores the archives on drive D: in the directory ARCHIV with names like DEMO001.<arctype> DEMO002.<arctype> ... options : These parameters control the way the archives are build. Only -s must be specified. All other options are optional (!?!). -s<integer> Size of the target archive. <integer> is the maximum size of the archives in 1000 bytes. This option is mandatory. e.g. -s361 creates archives with 361000 bytes size. Note ! The number given is NOT a faktor of 1024 (1K). -b backup mode. GEN only looks at files with the archive bit set. This are files that have not been backed up before. After this operation the archive flag is reset. With this option you can make incremental backups to handle only the lately modified files. -d<driveletter> diskmode. GEN creates the archives one after the other temporary on drive <driveletter> and copies each to the target directory if it is complete. This can give significant speedup because you may specify a ramdisk for the temporary location or a harddisk when you want to write your archives directly to floppy-disks. -i<startnr> increment to next free archive. Usually GEN numbers archives with 1,2,... . With this option in effect GEN uses the next free number in the target directory if there exist already some archives with the specified name. If a number is given after -i (e.g. -i5) the archiv numbering will start with it. -n no recurse. GEN will not(!) look into subdirectories. -o overwrite mode. GEN will overwrite any existing archives with the same name in the target directory. -p pause before creating a new archiv. GEN waits for a <RETURN> from the user before creating a new archive. Useful when directly creating archives on floppy disks. -r[<file>] read filenames to be archived. -r without any filename will take filenames or directories from standart input. If a directory is specified and -n is not in effect all included subdirectories are also handled. When specifing filenames wildcards are allowed according to DOS specifications (i.e. *.pas will take all files ending with .pas). The filenames can also be read from a pipe. All '/' are converted '\' to handle MS-DOS conventions. This allows to use programs like "stuff (a unixish "find") to build the filelists. If a filename is given all file and directory specifications are read from this file. -t[<path>] specify temporary path. This options lets you specify the location for temporary files both for GEN and the used archiver. If no path is present GEN will use the environment variable TMP if set. ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES --------------------- a) GEN All Options can be put into the environment variable GEN. This is useful if you have one preferred archiver and options you want to use every time you call GEN. To set an environment variable consult your DOS Manual. The options are handled as if they have been given in the commandline. b) ZOOLOW Recently a new version of ZOO has been released that uses an alternative high compression method. GEN defaults to this "better" method. However, there may be situations which demand the standard compression. In these cases set ZOOLOW to a values. If ZOOLOW is not set then the high compression method will be used Example: 'set ZOOLOW=1' will disable high compression with ZOO. 3. EXAMPLES ----------- Here are some examples of using GEN. > Create archives from all files in subdirectory \tools and it's subdirs with LHA as standard archiver. Restrict size to 361000 bytes. Create archives in \tools with name tool***.lzh Prepare: cd to \tools Call : GEN lzh -s361 tool > Same as above but don't step through subdirs Prepare: cd to \tools Call : GEN lzh -n -s361 tool > Same as above but store archives in another dir. Prepare: cd to \tools Call : GEN lzh -s361 \someotherdir\tool > or on another drive (say d:) Prepare: cd to \tools Call : GEN lzh -s361 d:\tool > store archives on floppies use hard-disk C: as location for creation. direct all temporary files to C:\temp Prepare: cd to \tools Call : GEN lzh -s361 -dc -tc:\temp a:\tool > store all .txt files starting from the current directory. Use STUFF Call : Stuff -name *.txt | GEN lzh -r -s361 d:\tool 4. HOW GEN WORKS ---------------- This section gives you some information about the way GEN handles the archivers. It may help you to understand its behaviour when constructing the archives. GEN knows about the used archivers. We tried to smoothen out the differences between the common archiving programs such as command line options, handling of temporary files and other peculiarities. here is a short semi-algorithmic description of GEN: - read commandline - detect availiable archiver - set options - read in all files to be archived - WHILE not all files processed -- check availiable space on drives -- begin new archive -- LOOP until archive has grown to given size ---- put files into archive assuming no compression --- ENDLOOP - ENDWHILE GEN tries to put as many files into the archive as possible using an iterativ mechanism. It constructs calls to the archivers and evaluates the returned status code. 5. PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS ----------------------- In some cases GEN will have problems to construct the desired archives. There may be some situations that we want to point out: a) A file to be archived cannot be compressed to the maximum size of the archive. -> If there is still enough space to store the oversized archive a warning is given and GEN proceeds. -> Otherwise GEN aborts. (GEN cannot split files) Solution: Split the big file manually (We now this is absolutely ugly, but we have not thought of a portable way of splitting files in different archives yet). b) Too many files are specified Solution: Try to archive single subdirs alone. Although GEN uses a very economic string storage it is limited. We had no problems with approx. 2000 files. When gen finishes its work the number of bytes uses is printed. The limit is reached by approx. 180000 bytes. The number of files that can be archived depends on the length of the filenames+subdirpathes. c) GEN finds not enough space on the drives. Solution: GEN stores its temporary files in the current directory or at the location specified by -t. Also the archivers get a working dir specification if they are capable of this. Check if you have set any environment variables that affect the archivers. GEN wants twice the space of an archiv at the location where it is created because some archivers need this. With -d you can overcome this problem in case of floppies. If you have inserted a floppy with insuffcient space GEN allows you to fix the problem via shell-escape if possible. 6. HOW TO CONTACT THE AUTHORS ----------------------------- No manual is perfect, no program is bugless. If you have any questions or problems feel free to contact us. We are interested in improving GEN and fixing further bugs. Any new ideas are welcome, too. Here are our e-mail addresses: Wolfgang Thronicke Friedrich Wichmann UUCP: wolf@cadlab.de wolft@uni-paderborn.de fwich@uni-paderborn.de ^ yes this is a different address!! 7. References: -------------- (Please forgive any misspellings and typos) STUFF and ZOO are copyrighted by Rahul Dhasi. MS-DOS is trademark of Microsoft. LHA and LHARC are copyrighted by PKZIP is copyrighted by PKWARE Inc. ARC is copyrighted by SEA Inc. ARJ is copyrighted by Robert K Jung. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This program was written using Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0.