Re: Shell script to add Binary II header

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Scott Alfter <scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us> wrote:
> I grabbed a few disk images from one of the archives today...found they
> weren't marked as to block order and really weren't set up for transferring
> to a real Apple II (as opposed to an emulator).  I sorted out which images
> were DOS 3.3 order and which were ProDOS order, then used CiderPress to put
> the images into ShrinkIt archives.
> 
> There's just one little problem: CiderPress won't create ShrinkIt archives
> with the Binary II headers they should have when residing on non-Apple II
> systems.
> 
> The shell script tacked onto the end of this post takes a ShrinkIt archive
> as input, adds a Binary II header to the beginning, and pads the file length
> to a multiple of 128 bytes.  I've tested the files it produces against
> NuLib2 and CiderPress; my Apple IIs are still packed up from my last move,
> so I haven't had a chance to transfer them over to one and unpack them
> there.
> 
> It was developed & tested under Cygwin (running on Windows), but should work
> anywhere a Bourne-compatible shell is available.  It doesn't use any
> nonstandard programs to do its work; just things like wc, awk, dd, etc. that
> should be on every computer.
> 
>   _/_
>  / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
> (IIGS( http://alfter.us/            Top-posting!
>  \_^_/                              >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

While the "old official" format calls for a Binary II wrapper, it no longer
serves any practical purpose. 

ShrinkIt and CiderPress are both tolerant of "file type abuse", and
unwrapped archives are completely usable. 

For all practical purposes, .bxy has become an "unusual" file format on web
repositories.

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon