To: John Tzerkesiz

 BL> The obvious thing is to remove the "#! (x)unbatch" line and let
 BL> the uncompressors identify it for themselves, but yes... PD
 BL> code is available for compress, gzip and zip. A have a version
 BL> of gzip that identifies all three compression methods after the
 BL> unbathc line has been removed, but it's a bit slow...

 JT> Is it slow just "because" or does it have to use "trial and
 JT> error" to work out exactly what type of decompression to apply?
 JT> If you have the source, it should be possible to change it to
 JT> adapt to the cuntbatch line if it has one. 

  PKZIP (and ZIP) identify on 'PK' as the first two characters in the
file. COMPRESS uses a 0x00 at around character 18 (from memory) and a
.z extension on the filename. GZIP, LZH and others use similar simple
identification. In operation, you open the file and look for the
various identifiers... then run whatever is required. It's very quick.

  What I am doing at present, is opening the file, jumping to the end
of the cuntbatch line, and then copying the whole file. GZIP works
out what to do. I don't use it! It does nothing. It's slow. And when
compressing, I compress the file and do the same in reverse.

 BL> What I've done, is add it on the end of the download. If you
 BL> poll for 50K of mail it takes 30 seconds at 14400, and the 4
 BL> seconds to open all the files, strip the unbatch and uncompress
 BL> it is lost in that 30-seconds.

 JT> That is ok for an end user, but if you do this as a mail hub,
 JT> it drags things on for too long a time.

  It's the same problem, actually. Tossing, duping and all that should
take the longest time, so you can hide the archiving on the end.

 BL> That's the beauty of Windows and event driven code. If you can
 BL> keep the processing under 100mS you don't even notice it... so
 BL> you tag all the long stuff onto whatever is unavoidably too
 BL> long (like loading the EXE file itself).

 JT> Windows makes me ill. That's why I'm back in the electronics
 JT> industry. I can use my OS of choice, I don't have to worry
 JT> about if I know windows or not. 

  Windows works. If Win95, OS/2 or Unix ever becomes dominant, then
I'll use that. Who cares as long as it works? It's silly to ignore the
dominant force in a marketplace.

Regards,
Bob
  
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

---