Problem with compress

[Brad Templeton]

It's a tough problem, actually.   It is nice to take the software tools
approach of splitting archiver and compressor, but this makes it more
difficult to do some of the cute things you can do when you combine them.

The simplest of which is the fairly standard archive of compressed
files, with each file compressed individually and extractable without
decompressing the entire archive -- a serious problem if it is a
multi-media archive or very large.

Of course, a compiler that could do this, and which called a compressor
as a filter, would not be too hard to make.  But tar, cpio and others do
not have any support for this.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473