[Lzip-bug] Lziprecover 1.18-pre3 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Lziprecover 1.18-pre3 is ready for testing here
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/lziprecover/lziprecover-1.18-pre3.tar.lz
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/lziprecover/lziprecover-1.18-pre3.tar.gz

The sha1sums are:
fc08eed91fa1c3b5942ae9706e3e08ae81138d1a  lziprecover-1.18-pre3.tar.lz
3093c93f55c6dbfbbc0d1e96020865d3af58c11c  lziprecover-1.18-pre3.tar.gz

Please, test it and report any bugs you find.

Lziprecover is a data recovery tool and decompressor for files in the 
lzip compressed data format (.lz), able to repair slightly damaged 
files, produce a correct file by merging the good parts of two or more 
damaged copies, extract data from damaged files, decompress files and 
test integrity of files.

Lziprecover is able to recover or decompress files produced by any of 
the compressors in the lzip family; lzip, plzip, minilzip/lzlib, clzip 
and pdlzip.

The lzip file format is designed for data sharing and long-term 
archiving, taking into account both data integrity and decoder availability.

A nice feature of the lzip format is that a corrupt byte is easier to 
repair the nearer it is from the beginning of the file. Therefore, with 
the help of lziprecover, losing an entire archive just because of a 
corrupt byte near the beginning is a thing of the past.

If the cause of file corruption is damaged media, the combination GNU 
ddrescue[1] + lziprecover is the best option for recovering data from 
multiple damaged copies.

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


Changes in this version:

  * "--repair" now tries bytes at member offsets 7 to 11 first because 
errors in these bytes sometimes can't be detected until the end of the 
member.

  * The test of the value remaining in the range decoder has been 
removed. (After extensive testing it has been found useless to detect 
corruption in the decompressed data. Eliminating it reduces the number 
of false positives for corruption and makes error detection more accurate).

  * The new options "-d, --delta", "-t, --truncate" and "-z, --zcmp" 
have been added to unzcrash.

  * Unzcrash now can read files as large as RAM allows.

  * Unzcrash now compares the output of the decompressor for the 
original and corrupt files when the decompressor returns with zero 
status. For this unzcrash needs a 'zcmp' program able to understand the 
format being tested. For example the one provided by 'zutils'[2].

  * Unzcrash now accepts a negative position (relative to the end of 
file) and a negative size (relative to the rest of the file).


[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
[2] http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/zutils.html

Regards,
Antonio Diaz, lziprecover author and maintainer.