Subject: MS-DOS compress for .Z files, MS-DOS uude/encode, etc 23. ***** Q: Where can I find compress for MS-DOS to handle .Z files? Q2: Is there a tar for MS-DOS? A: Unix has compress, uncompress and zcat programs to pack or unpack files which are given the .Z extension. These files can also be handled under MS-DOS using for example /pc/unix/comp430d.zip, which is available from anonymous FTP sites like garbo.uwasa.fi, etc. You can also use /pc/unix/gzip124.zip, which is more general and can handle .Z and .(g)z files. There is one useful trick if you uncompress on MS-DOS such text files that have been made on Unix with compress. Unix and MS-DOS have different eolns (end of lines). You can extract a Unix compressed text file as follows comp430d -d -c YourZFile | unix2pc > YourOutputFile where unix2pc.exe is taken from /pc/ts/tsfilt22.zip (or whatever is the current version number). While we are at it let's look at two similar questions of MS-DOS counterparts for Unix file handling. Uuencoding and uudecoding is a common method to handle files so that they can be sent as ordinary ascii email. There are several utilities for uu(en/de)coding files on a PC. See our /pc/decode directory. One that I can recommend is uuexe540.zip (or whichever version is current), which has an option to use formats like the one employed in the comp.binaries.ibm.pc binary postings. Yet another often queried counterpart for Unix is tar for MS-DOS. See our directory /pc/unix for tar extractor utilities such as tar4dos.zoo, extar10.zip (or whatever version number is current), ltarv3.zip or tar320f-.zip. If you have a *.tar.Z file, you'll first have to uncompress it and then untar it. On MS-DOS this requires a bit of juggling with the file names, since MS-DOS can handle only one point (.) in a file name. (Since I have been asked: On VAX/VMS the extension TAR-Z is often used, but unlike Unix tar.Z that is a local rather than a generic convention.) --------------------------------------------------------------------