Message: 3349938, Reply to: 3349547, 64 lines
 Posted: 11:41pm EDT, Thu Aug 25/88
 Subject: ftp-ing generally
 To: Steve Tinney
 From: Howard Chu
 
 Hm... A few problems in that text. The 6th paragraph is jumbled, as if you
 entered the same text twice.
 
 Your explanation of what to do with various file suffixes is also spotty and
 hard to follow. I s'pose a different summary would help:
 
 
  Suffix      FTP Type
   .arc         bin       If the remote host is a TOPS-20 or DEC-10
   .tar         bin       system, (e.g., simtel20.arpa) use "tenex"
   .shar        ascii     instead of binary. If both remote and local
   .tar.Z       bin       hosts are Unix systems, use binary for
   .shar.Z      bin       everything.
   .Z           bin
 
 .arc archives can be handled with a number of programs on MSDOS.
   xarc, arcx, arce, and pkxarc can all be used to extract the
      contents of a .ARC archive.
   arcv can be used to view the contents of the archive.
   arc and pkarc can be used for the above as well as for general
      purpose manipulation of archives.
 
 On MTS, use the *ARC program. It operates like the MSDOS arc, but
   must distinguish between binary and text files when handling
   files in an archive. (See the CC Memo or Volume 2 for more info
   about *ARC.)
 
 .tar archives can be extracted by the tarread program on MSDOS.
   Pdtar allows general purpose manipulation of tar files.
 
 On MTS, use *Unixtar. The tar file must be in an MTS line file
   with a fixed number of bytes per line, and that number must be
   a multiple of 512. A fixed record length of 10240 bytes per
   line is preferred. (.ARC archives must also be of fixed length,
   but there is no preferred length.)
 
 .shar archives are best handled on a Unix system. They can be
   extracted with the shar program on MSDOS as well. There is no
   utility on MTS for the purpose of manipulating shar files.
 
 By convention, any filename with a ".Z" suffix denotes a file
   compressed by the Unix compress utility. These files are usually
   not manageable on an MSDOS machine, due to the amounts of real
   memory they require for their compression scheme. They can be
   decompressed on a Unix system with the uncompress command, as
   well as the zcat command. (See the appropriate Unix man page for
   details.) They can also be expanded using ZCAT on MTS.
 
 .tar.Z files are compressed tar archives. They need to be expanded
   before being processed with regular tar utilities. On MTS, use
   ZCAT:zcat-tar. This program will produce output suitable for use
   with *Unixtar.
 
 .shar.Z files are compressed shar archives. These also need to be
   expanded before regular processing. On MTS, use ZCAT:zcat, and
   also perform the commands in LFKY:postzcat.
 
 
 
 Sheesh. That's a lot longer than I expected. Ah well. I think, if
 we're really going to be telling other people how to do this stuff,
 I should come up with another ZCAT that outputs readable text. I'll
 call it ZCAT-ASC for now. Then you can use it for .shar.Z's, as well
 as any other compressed plain-ASCII-text files.
 ------------------------
 
 Message: 3349547, 4 lines
 Posted: 6:45pm EDT, Thu Aug 25/88
 Subject: ftp-ing generally
 To: Howard Chu
 From: Steve Tinney
 
 Incidentally, if you have a few moments kicking your heels, you could take
 a look at lfky:ftp.notes, which is essentially what I gave Bill Baxter, with
 some minor mods (ie I explicated the bin..get sequence). If you see anything
 missing, or anything wrong, I'd appreciate your critique.