Hello,
Vincent Lefevre (maintainer of the MPFR package) suggested that
utilities like zdiff, bzdiff, lzdiff, etc, should be provided
independently of compressors. So I have written a package named zutils
where I include such utilities with support for gzip, bzip2, lzip and
uncompressed files. (Support for other compressors may be added later).
I am writing you because the most obvious names for such utilities are
the names of the utilities already distributed with gzip. I hope we can
cooperate to avoid name clashes in distributions. I think the best way
is gzip, bzip2 and lzip stop distributing their respective utilities and
distributions provide the zutils port/package to replace those utilities.
Alternatively, gzip utilities could be renamed to gzcat, gzdiff, etc.
If you want to check the concept, the zutils tarball can be downloaded
from http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/
With zutils you can do:
zdiff file1.lz file2.gz
zdiff file1.bz2 file2
or
lzgrep "string" file1 file2.lz file3.gz file4.bz2
Best regards,
Antonio.
