Dear Jim and Paul,
Jim Meyering wrote:
Let's see how things stand in a month or two.
As you already know, the zutils package[1] has been offered to GNU and
is waiting approval. A year has passed, but it seems coordination with
the gzip maintainers to avoid name clashes between the two packages is
the main pending issue.
[1] http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/zutils.html
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/zutils/zutils-0.9-rc2.tar.gz
I think zutils adds useful functionality to the GNU System. Moreover, I
have rewritten zutils in C++ (instead of shell scripts) so that it can
do all the requested things in a robust manner. See for example the
description from http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/zutils.html
"Zutils is a collection of utilities able to deal with any combination
of compressed and non-compressed files transparently. If any given file,
including standard input, is compressed, its uncompressed content is
used. Compressed files are decompressed on the fly; no temporary files
are created. These utilities are not wrapper scripts but safer and more
efficient C++ programs. In particular the "--recursive" option is very
efficient in those utilities supporting it."
The compressors supported by zutils are bzip2, gzip, lzip and xz.
With zutils you can do things like these:
zcat -An file1.bz2 file2.gz file3
zcmp file1.gz -
zdiff file1.bz2 file2.gz
zdiff file1.gz file2
zgrep "string" file1 file2.lz file3.gz file4.bz2
ztest --recursive --verbose releases/
Please, could you try zutils and tell me if you find it valuable? Thanks.
In case you find zutils valuable, I propose to rename the corresponding
gzip-only scripts in the gzip distribution to gzcat, gzcmp, gzdiff, and
gzgrep, so that the multi-compressor programs in zutils can replace them.
Best regards,
Antonio.
