[Zutils-bug] Zutils 1.9 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of zutils 1.9.

Zutils is a collection of utilities able to process any combination of 
compressed and uncompressed files transparently. If any file given, 
including standard input, is compressed, its decompressed 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 option '--recursive' is very efficient in those 
utilities supporting it.

The utilities provided are zcat, zcmp, zdiff, zgrep, ztest, and zupdate.
The formats supported are bzip2, gzip, lzip, and xz.
Zutils uses external compressors. The compressor to be used for each format 
is configurable at runtime.

zcat, zcmp, zdiff, and zgrep are improved replacements for the shell scripts 
provided by GNU gzip. ztest is unique to zutils. zupdate is similar to 
gzip's znew.

The homepage is at http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/zutils.html

The sources can be downloaded from 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/zutils/

The sha256sum is:
59d83cb129788528d311a0bb686e40986c6941b1ad90edc20a91878c39aa5c78 
zutils-1.9.tar.lz

This release is also GPG signed. You can download the signature by appending 
'.sig' to the URL. If the 'gpg --verify' command fails because you don't 
have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 8FE99503132D7742

Key fingerprint = 1D41 C14B 272A 2219 A739  FA4F 8FE9 9503 132D 7742


Changes in version 1.9:

  * zcmp anf zdiff now meet the POSIX requirement for cmp and diff that the 
standard input shall be used only if the file1 or file2 operand refers to 
standard input.

  * zdiff now passes the options '-W' and '-y' to diff. (But it only works 
if the diff program used supports them).

  * Bzip2 and lzip files are now detected better.
('echo LZIP | zcat' and 'echo BZh5 | zcat' no longer return an error).

  * ztest now continues checking the rest of the files if any input file is 
a terminal.

  * 'ztest -v' now prints the number of files that failed the test (as lzip 
does).

  * zcat, zgrep, and ztest now check for errors when closing the input file 
in addition to checking when closing the input from the decompressor.

  * Trailing data remaining in the data feeder to the decompressor are now 
correctly ignored.

  * zupdate has been modified to support the new behavior of lzip 1.22's 
option '-o' while retaining:
perfect backwards compatibility with older versions of lzip down to 1.20,
good backwards compatibility with older versions of lzip down to 1.11,
acceptable backwards compatibility with older versions of lzip down to 1.4.

  * zupdate now keeps combined extensions: tgz, tbz, tbz2, txz --> tlz. 
This is useful when recompressing Slackware packages, for example.

  * zupdate now puts single quotes around file names when calling zcmp to 
allow file names with spaces. (But putting spaces in file names is a bad idea).

  * The descriptions of zcat, zcmp, and zdiff have been improved.


Please send bug reports and suggestions to zutils-bug@nongnu.org


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, zutils author and maintainer.
Self-determination is a human right. Free Catalan political prisoners.
--
If you care about interoperability and long-term archiving, please help me 
replace xz with lzip. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html Thanks.