Problem with compress

[Christopher M. Conway]

In article <1991May15.062504.28369 at looking.on.ca>, brad at looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
-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
-
Actually, the example you gave is quite easy. Compress the files individually,
e.g. compress * or for a directory hierarchy the compressdir tool just
posted or something similar; tar the result. Voila, one archive of compressed
files, with each compressed file individually extractable without decompressing
anything else.

There is nothing that can be done in one monolithic tool that can't be
done more flexibly (although possibly more complex) with lots of small
tools. Count me as a vote for tar and some kind of compress (I use Yabba
now, myself).
--
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