When compressing a number of files together into one file using HELBENDR, do not put an extension on the filename from the prompt. |After you have observed HELBENDR to terminate by its beep and its clearing the screen, then you can add the extension safely. For an ununknown reason, some machines will loose the file if the extension is appended to the filename during the run. Decompression with MUDPUPPY has no problem with extensions.
Since HELBENDR erases the files as it incorperates them into the compressed file, you should back them up by copying them elsewhere as in "copy wasp????.bas wasp????.box" to be safe.
The only time to ignore this precaution is if your hard drive is nearly full, you have no space or place to copy the backups, and you can't do anything with your machine without clearing something off your hard drive, and you would like to save it somehow. Saving it with HELBENDR beats erasing it, will erase it anyway if it fails, rarely fails, but fails if it runs out of space on the disk, but is designed to require very little space in which to operate. Other compression packages require as much space as 2n of n equally sized files in which to operate. SaALAMANDERS (MUDPUPPY and HELBENDRzzzzzzzzz) require 3 times the size of 1 file and 4/n the time it would require if it did all the appending before comressing. Instead of inter mixing compression and appending.
