Conference hydra::amiga_v1

3141.0. "ZOO ?'s" by HYDRA::CHICOINE () Wed Nov 22 1989 08:58

   Hello all,


   I've got a few Zoo oriented questions for you;

    I've been downloading a few things recently and been fine
 so far,,, but I've run into a few need to knows before I progress.

    When dealing with the Fred Fish disks I don't need or want
 much of what is on the disks. So, on the VMS side I do a
 { Zoo -e// FF###.zoo }  to an empty subdirectory and unbundle 
 the files, I then delete the directories and files I don't want 
 and do a { Zoo a file.zoo [.dir...] }  
 Now and then a file tends to not get extracted (usually the executable
 program itself) but I check the lists carefully and extract the 
 individual files if it happens, so the unbundling and re-bundling 
 seem fine enough. When I download and extract the files at home I 
 am able to run most things, but I can only { Zoo e/ filename.zoo }  to
 one directory level. If I try extracting with // I get errors about 
 the long list of directories/subdirectories/file names.
 (sometimes I'm talking about 5 subdirectories down)
 a typical  { Zoo l filename.zoo }  looks like: 
 [CHICOINE.AMIGA.FISH.FF253.filename]filename.info 
 [CHICOINE.AMIGA.FISH.FF253]filename.info 
 

    So you see my problem, Programs with lots of files in lots of
 directories are a real bother to try to reconstruct.
 If there is a better way, could someone feed me the correct method
 and command strings to

1. Unbundle a .Zoo file on the VMS side,

2. Re bundle a stripped .Zoo on the VMS side,
 
3. Unbundle it on the AMIGA with the original directory structure intact.


   Or,,, if you have an ONLINE  ZOO users manual that would be nice.

  
     
     Thanks in advance,,,,  Have a nice Holiday.

                         *** May God Bless ***
                             John Chicoine

    John,
    
    A simpler way to keep the directory structure intact is to never
    unpack the .ZOO file!  Let me explain... The first part of your
    procedure is fine, unpacking the whole zoo then looking for stuff
    you want to keep.  But after you have decided what to discard, then
    do the following (still on your VMS system)...
    
    	zoo -delete ffxxx file_to_delete another_deletion etc
    
    With judicious use of wildcards you can slim down the original zoo
    rather quickly.  In fact, I usually use the form
    
    	zoo -delete ffxxx [.subdir1*]* [.subdir2*]*    (etc.)
    
    which takes out whole subdirectory trees.  Two points of caution:
    Use the "-delete" option to make the archive repack, unless you
    want to deal with getting around VMS's case insensitivity.  Second,
    be careful when deleting files with names like ".info" -- like-named
    files appearing in several place will all disappear.  Usually I
    am left with a few orphan files to get rid of when unpacking on
    the Amiga.
    
    As far as files not extracting -- VMS has trouble with some characters
    which are legal in AmigaDOS filenames.  The problem with long
    subdirectory names is known to ZOO's author, Rahul Dhesi.  He sent
    me a note asking for help in patching ZOO to start at the current
    subdirectory rather than at the top level directory when parsing
    filenames.
    
    Wes

Thanks Wes!  This has been bugging me too!

John