Re: ShrinkIt...

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Labelas Enoreth <labelas@hotmail.com> wrote:

> pardon my ignorance, but what is nulib? Something which Shrinkit is based
> off of?

Nope.  Andy Nicholas wrote ShrinkIt and designed the file structure used
by its archive files.  The file structure itself is called "NuFX" (and
this appears in its header).

NuLib was written by Andy McFadden.  It is a freeware program for UNIX
and MS-DOS systems that supports NuFX (i.e. ShrinkIt) files, allowing
standard operations such as adding files, deleting files, extracting,
etc.  It also has limited support for the Apple II "Binary II" file
format, which is used to maintain ProDOS directory information when a
file is transmitted to another machine via modem.  (A ".bxy" file is a
ShrinkIt archive with a Binary II header.)

NuLib is distributed in both source and executable forms, so it should
be possible to port it to any reasonably capable platform that supports
a command line.

The difficulty with running it on the Mac is that the Mac has no command
line support - at best, you would have a rather messy application which
prompted you for the command line, or you would have to do some
extensive changes to get it to be more Mac-like.

Another option would be to turn it into a tool for MPW (the Macintosh
Programmers' Workshop), which is a command line environment.  I haven't
looked into writing MPW tools (I hardly ever use MPW anyway), so I don't
know how much work might be involved in this.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand