Re: Patch for transparent decompression

[Reuben Thomas]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:

> I was thinking more of providing 2 options, so the user can tell grep what 
> kind of compression we use.

That's of little use: it only solves the case where you're using a large 
number of files compressed with the same compressor. If you're only using 
one file you can just decompress it into grep, and if you're using mixed 
compression schemes, it doesn't help.

Having said that, I've thought of another option, though it's possibly 
politically awkward, and that is to use libmagic (from file) to find out 
what sort of file you're looking at when in transparent decompression mode. 
The correct decompressor could then be selected, and others (e.g. liblzo) 
added as desired without complicating the code or needing any one 
compression library to recognise all the different types.

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