13 Dec
2011
13 Dec
'11
5:16 p.m.
On 12/13/2011 07:51 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
What I expect, want and demand:
It unpacks to the name(s) of the file(s) [and folders] in the archive
and leaves the original archive the fsck alone.
In my early Linux days, I was /very/ annoyed several times when Gunzip
cheerfully *removed the archive I told it to unpack*. This is
*absolutely* unacceptable to my mind.
Why? Because it differs from another tool that you may have been
accustomed to? If that's why, be aware that gzip's user interface is
patterned after a tool that far predates pkzip/pkarc/arc/etc, and that
behavior has been the accepted one that has been considered logical and
good since the 1970s.
Also be advised that you didn't tell it to unpack an archive
(something gzip doesn't do), you told it to decompress a compressed
file. Tar (say) doesn't remove a tar file after extracting its
contents, because...well, cheerfully removing the archive you told it to
unpack would be absolutely unacceptable.
Decompressing a compressed file is a whole different animal; you can
get things right back where they were (if you need to) with a single
command. The only possible difference is the original user's
compression setting, and I respectfully submit that the loss of that
information isn't frequently a big deal.
File compression is something that you "do" to a single file. Should
"undoing" it result in two copies of the file, one with it "done" and
the other with it "undone"? THAT seems ridiculous to me.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA