Re: gunzip incompatible

[Thomas Weber]

On 28/01/08 13:45 -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 28-Jan-2008, Mats Hedlund wrote:
> 
> | In matlab, this works for unzipping an ODF spreadsheet: gunzip('file.ods').
> | In octave, it does not, replying with 'unknown file format'.
> | Any thoughts on this and ways to fix it?
> 
> Octave's gunzip function is just a .m file.  It ultimately calls
> another function called unpack to do the work.  I think the problem is
> that gunzip is leaving it up to unpack to determine which
> uncompression utility to use, when it should probably be forcing it to
> use gzip.  It would be great if someone could have a look at this
> problem and propose a patch.  Similar changes would likely be
> appropriate for the bunzip2, untar, and unzip functions.

Well, how do you determine the compressing algorithm if not by the
extension (by the way, .odf can be extracted by unzip, not gunzip)?

"file" is highly system-dependant. I guess the only solution would be to
try all commands on an unknown file type and check their return value -
bah, that's ugly.

        Thomas