Re: gzip: add "--keep" option to keep original files unchanged

[Rodrigo Campos]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 06:49:15AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 02/10/2013 05:59 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > On 02/10/2013 07:41 AM, Rodrigo Campos wrote:
> >> Is this use case valid enough to accept
> >> the patch ?
> > 
> > I'm sort of on the fence on this one.
> > Comments from others welcome.
> 
> You can emulate --keep with 'gzip -c ... > file.gz'; but a quick look at

Not really, you can if you want all the files to be in a single .gz (or if you
need to compress just one file).
I need to compress various files, but keep them in separate files. So, if you
want to do that you need to iterate over all files you want to compress and do
the "gzip -c" on each file.

As I said, there are workarounds but they do not solve the real problem.

> other compression utilities shows that it is a common option:
> 
> $ xz --help | grep keep
>   -k, --keep          keep (don't delete) input files
> $ bzip2 --help 2>&1 | grep keep
>    -k --keep           keep (don't delete) input files
> 
> I'm in favor of the addition, but with the short option -k rather than -K.

Cool. If the final decision is to commit it, let me know if I should re-send
changing the short option  to "-k" :)




Thanks a lot,
Rodrigo