Re: Zutils vs single compressor utilities

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

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.