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From: amit@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Neta Amit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: ARC/ZOO/TAR
Message-ID: <3027@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>
Date: Mon, 30-Nov-87 11:45:38 EST
Article-I.D.: umn-cs.3027
Posted: Mon Nov 30 11:45:38 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Dec-87 04:22:06 EST
Reply-To: amit@umn-cs.UUCP (Neta Amit)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Minnesota
Lines: 33

ARC (and derivatives) has been around for quite some time, and has developed
    into the MS-DOS de-facto standard for archiving and info-exchange.

To me, the main advantage of ZOO is its ability to store structure,
    as well as contents. There are two disadvantages: (1) it is not widely
    accepted, and (2) it needs an external source to create the structure
    for it. I.e. lookup the ZOO manual under the -I switch, and notice
    that under Unix, the Find command creates the structure, which is
    subsequently given to ZOO.  Under MS-DOS, Find is non-existant,
    and you need to specify the structure manually -- a tedious job.

This weekend, a public domain TAR (courtesy John Gilmore) has been posted
on comp.sources.unix, and is now implemented under Unix and MS-DOS. It
is likely to be ported to VMS, MAC, Amiga.

PDTAR offers a number of significant advantages over both ZOO and ARC:
  - It is the de-facto standard in the Unix world. Info-exchange with
    Unix machines is much easier with TAR.
  - It creates the structure it needs
  - It is fast; on the small sample that I did -- faster than ARC or ZOO
  - It can compress, and the resulting archive is small; on the sample above, 
    smaller than the .arc or .zoo files

Standards should occasionally be replaced by better standards, not
necessarily offering downward compatability.  After PDTAR will have
stabilized, I suggest that BBS's and national archives adhere to it.



-- 
  Neta Amit 
  U of Minnesota CSci
  Arpanet: amit@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu