Re: option `-o' for regular file

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Adam,

Adam Tuja wrote:
> First, I'm not big programmer so don't look at "the patch" too harshly

Sorry, I didn't intend to seem harsh, just to state that a different 
approach was needed to make it work correctly in all cases.

In any case, I have already implemented the option -o in a way compatible 
with your needs and with the rest of lzip. I'll release it as soon as I have 
the time to test it.


> $ lzip -k -o file1.out file1.in file2 file3
>
> What I propose is to make it more general and accept all files, whether
> regular or `stdin'. After all there is only one standard input so there
> can be only one output for it, same if it accepted regular files there
> would be only one output for every `-o' input (in most general case).

"one output for every `-o' input" is not how option -o is supposed to work. 
Programs providing option -o only accept it once, and write to the file 
specified all the output produced. From your example above you seem to think 
that only the output of file1.in is going to file1.out, and file2 and file3 
are compressed into file2.lz and file3.lz respectively, which is not the 
case. As I have implemented -o, lzip would write to file1.out the exact same 
data it would have written to standard output with the option -c. (The 
concatenation of the compressed file1.in, file2, and file3).


> > (...) But for other compressors (bzip2, lzip), the decompressed
> > name is always the compressed name minus the extension (or .tlz --> .tar).
> > There is no need to call 'lzip -l' to know what the decompressed name is.
>
> That's my point - I show you 'a need' for it. Even thought up a simple way to 
> do it - '-ll' in mainc:

A simpler way to do it is running a script like this on the compressed name:

#! /bin/sh
case "$1" in
  ?*.lz) echo "$1" | sed -e 's/\.lz$//' ;;
  ?*.tlz) echo "$1" | sed -e 's/\.tlz$/.tar/' ;;
  *) echo "$1.out" ;;
esac


> PS. In my opinion `-o' option appends '.lz' excessively (during
> compression, decompression is fine).

This is because of the original use of -o in lzip; providing a virtual name 
for the uncompressed file when reading from standard input.

I may change it now to behave more like -o in other programs, but lzip will 
still need to change the name when compressing and splitting the output in 
volumes.


Best regards,
Antonio.