On 12/01/10 04:41, Wieman, Karl wrote: > Under gzip 1.4, if you specify --force, gzip will attempt to > compress 'FILE.gz' and create 'FILE.gz.gz'. Under previous > versions, even with '-f' specified, it would exit with "gzip: > FILE.gz already has .gz suffix -- unchanged" and leave FILE.gz > unchanged.
This change predates 1.4: it was in gzip 1.3.13 (dated 2009-09-30). It was installed due to an earlier bug report; see <http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-gzip@gnu.org/msg00091.html>. > We use -f to allow gzip to overwrite existing .gz files without prompting. Sorry, I don't get the connection. -f still does that: $ echo foo >foo $ gzip foo $ echo blahblah >foo $ ls -l foo* -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 9 Dec 1 10:55 foo -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 28 Dec 1 10:55 foo.gz $ gzip -f foo $ ls -l foo* -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 31 Dec 1 10:55 foo.gz Can you please give a useful scenario that used to work under gzip 1.3.12 but fails in later gzips? Hmm, I see that NEWS incorrectly claimed that this change was in gzip 1.3.12. I fixed this as follows: >From 8290fee360b58995c6b58404817afcc032c3473e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 11:02:04 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] * NEWS: The "gzip -f foo.gz" change occurred in 1.3.13, not 1.3.12 --- NEWS | 4 ++-- 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS index 0866500..18baee4 100644 --- a/NEWS +++ b/NEWS @@ -52,6 +52,8 @@ GNU gzip NEWS -*- outline -*- * Noteworthy changes in release 1.3.13 (2009-09-30) [stable] +** 'gzip -f foo.gz' now creates a file foo.gz.gz instead of complaining. + ** Bug fixes gzip -d no longer fails with "-" as 2nd or subsequent argument @@ -65,8 +67,6 @@ Major changes in Gzip 1.3.12 (2007-04-13) * znew now uses $TMPDIR (default /tmp) instead of always using /tmp. -* 'gzip -f foo.gz' now creates a file foo.gz.gz instead of complaining. - * It is now documented that gzip ignores case when examining file name extensions; for example, 'gzip test.Gz' (without -f) fails because the file name ends in '.Gz'. -- 1.7.2
