[Haskell-cafe] directory tree?

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 02:13:05PM -0700, Chad Scherrer wrote:
> On 6/25/07, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> >Are you sure you really have gzip files?  If you're on a Linux or
> >similar box, what does "file myfile.z" report to you?  It should say
> >something like "gzip compressed data".
> 
> Aarrgh, that's the problem - it does use compress. Is the distinction
> between .z and .Z not an established standard? I'm guessing there's
> not a Haskell interface for compress.

Very standard.

.z  : always pack
.Z  : always compress
.gz : always gzip

gzip can handle all three, zlib only the last.  (Are you *sure* your
file is compress?)

> I could just tell the OS to start a gzip process, but I need to be
> able to build it here on my Linux box, and run it on various MS
> machines. Seems like the best approach at this point might be to
> require everyone (only 3 people) to uncompress the data onto the hard
> drive first, then go from there.

Or could could reimplement compress in Haskell.  The algorithm is
shockingly simple, and there is a sample implementation (needs
optimization and compress(1) header support, but the LZW engine is
there) is already on the Wiki.  Note that the patent expired in June
'06, so you don't need to worry about that.

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Toy_compression_implementations

Stefan