Packed together should be this documentation file and the MacBooz application. Source code in THINK Lightspeed 'C' is available seperately. (Sources in almost-portable 'C' for the complete Zoo package are also available)
Quick documentation for MacBooz 1.0
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Recently the comp.binaries.ibm.pc newsgroup on UseNet began posted all its files in ZOO archive format.
- Zoo uses Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression, like most of the "old" archive utilities such as Arc and StuffIt. The author is considering adding support for one of the new compression techniques from Japan
(see the program "MacLZSS" for a sample).
- Zoo was written to be very portable between UNIX and MS-DOS, and easily portable to other systems
- Zoo is a free program; no shareware fees, although copyright is held on Zoo itself (Booz, however, is completely public domain).
Proponents of Zoo do not advance it as the ideal archive system for every operating system. StuffIt, Arc, PKZIP, etc. should be optimized for speed and given good interfaces, specific to their native environments. Zoo fills the role as a standard for transferring between different operating systems. Since its sources are freely
available and fairly portable, every computer should be able to handle ZOO archives.
MacBooz 1.0
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This is a very simple port of Booz 1.02 (25 Aug 88) to the Macintosh.
From the Booz documentation:
"Booz 1.02 is a small, memory-efficient Zoo archive extractor/lister. It is not fancy. It does not recognize the advanced features available in current versions of Zoo, such as long filenames, directory names, comments, and multiple file generations. Extraction always uses a short MS-DOS format filename and all extracted files go into the current directory.... Booz 1.02 can extract and list all archives created by all currently-existing versions of Zoo."
A simple command line interface is used for MacBooz 1.0:
(command) archivename[.zoo] [filespecs]
- (command) can be:
l list filenames to the screen
t test files to verify the archive is undamaged
x extract files to the disk
- archivename is the name of the zoo archive to process. It is assumed to end in ".zoo" unless you specify another ending ".???" (see wildcards, below). The archive should be in the same folder as MacBooz.
- filespecs are optional. With no filespecs, MacBooz will operate on all files in the archive (list all, extract all, test all). With filespecs, you specify exactly which files in the archive to work
with.
UNIX-style "wildcards" are supported. A question mark "?" matches any single character in a filename. An asterisk "*" matches any string of characters (any length).
For example: MS-DOS executable programs (applications) always end with ".EXE" or ".COM". With wildcards you refer to these simply as "*.EXE *.COM".
More complicated example: if an archive contains 10 files named "patch.01" thru "patch.10" alongside a file contained "patch.exe", you can refer to everything but "patch.exe" by specifying "patch.??".
Future
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The interface could use some obvious improvements. Assembly language speedups are always nice.
The complete Zoo package should be ported, so Macs can create ZOOs as well as extract them.
