[Zutils-bug] Zutils 1.11 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

I am pleased to announce the release of zutils 1.11.

Zutils is a collection of utilities able to process any combination of 
compressed and uncompressed files transparently. If any file given, 
including standard input, is compressed, its decompressed content is used. 
Compressed files are decompressed on the fly; no temporary files are created.

These utilities are not wrapper scripts but safer and more efficient C++ 
programs. In particular the option '--recursive' is very efficient in those 
utilities supporting it.

The utilities provided are zcat, zcmp, zdiff, zgrep, ztest, and zupdate.
The formats supported are bzip2, gzip, lzip, xz, and zstd.
Zutils uses external compressors. The compressor to be used for each format 
is configurable at runtime.

zcat, zcmp, zdiff, and zgrep are improved replacements for the shell scripts 
provided by GNU gzip. ztest is unique to zutils. zupdate is similar to 
gzip's znew.

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

The sources can be downloaded from 
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/zutils/

The sha256sum is:
50e8e24b0a280ccab037004b9000b070d17a6e0cd86972927d1b2a5505421389 
zutils-1.11.tar.lz

This release is also GPG signed. You can download the signature by appending 
'.sig' to the URL. If the 'gpg --verify' command fails because you don't 
have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 8FE99503132D7742

Key fingerprint = 1D41 C14B 272A 2219 A739  FA4F 8FE9 9503 132D 7742


Changes in version 1.11:

  * A race has been fixed in zcmp and zdiff that sometimes made them return 
1 (files differ) instead of 2 (trouble) when a compressor is not found or 
when the wrong format is forced.

  * In case of error in an argument to a command line option, all tools now 
show the name of the option.

  * In case of error in a numerical argument to a command line option, zcmp 
now shows the name of the option and the range of valid values.

  * Support for the zstd format has been added to all tools. This allows, 
among other things, zupdating zstd files to lzip format for long-term 
archiving, and using zcmp along with the unzcrash tool (from the lziprecover 
package) to test zstd files.

  * 'zdiff --verbose --version' now prints the version of the diff program 
used if it supports the option '--version'.

  * 'zgrep --verbose --version' now prints the version of the grep program 
used if it supports the option '--version'.

  * It has been documented in the manual how to recompress files with 
zupdate from a read-only file system to another place by first linking the 
files from the destination directory and then compressing the links:
'ln -s /src/foo.gz . && zupdate foo.gz'

  * The texinfo category of the manual has been changed from 'Data 
Compression' to 'Compression' to match that of gzip. (Reported by Alfred M. 
Szmidt).


Please send bug reports and suggestions to zutils-bug@nongnu.org


Regards,
Antonio Diaz, zutils author and maintainer.

--
If you care about data safety and long-term archiving, please consider using 
lzip. See http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Quality-assurance and
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html Thanks.