Re: option `-o' for regular file

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Adam,

Adam Tuja wrote:
> Thanks, that will do. Will have to.

This has been a major change. I have needed to rework the main loop of lzip. 
Among other things I discovered that the new -o can't be made to work 
reliably along with -S if more than one file is given.

After much thinking, finally I have found a way to make -o work acceptably 
while maintaining forward and backward compatibility with zutils. As soon as 
I port the changes to clzip (to be sure that they are correct), I'll release 
new versions of lzip and zutils. (Most probably tomorrow).

You will like to know that the new -o won't append the extension .lz when 
reading from a file. Here is the new manual entry:

'-o FILE'
'--output=FILE'
     If '--stdout' has not been also specified, write the (de)compressed
     output to 'FILE'; keep input files unchanged.

     In order to keep backward compatibility with lzip versions prior to
     1.22, when compressing from standard input and no other file names are
     given, the extension '.lz' is appended to 'FILE' unless it already ends
     in '.lz' or '.tlz'. This feature will be removed in a future version
     of lzip. Meanwhile, redirection may be used instead of '-o' to write
     the compressed output to a file without the extension '.lz' in its
     name: 'lzip < file > foo'.

     When compressing and splitting the output in volumes, 'FILE' is used
     as a prefix, and several files named 'FILE00001.lz', 'FILE00002.lz',
     etc, are created. In this case, only one input file is allowed.


> When it comes to testing - you can put patch in temporary pastebin.pl and I can 
> test it. You don't have to do everything yourself.

Thanks. That would have been too cumbersome. I have needed to make several 
changes (not only to lzip, but also to zutils) in response to the successive 
issues I have found.

Best regards,
Antonio.