On May 15, 2010, at 21:43, Ackerman, Alan wrote:
> This is silly. There must be a million different ways a file could be
> corrupted in transit, and not detected by 'unpack'. UNPACK simply wasn't
> designed to detect file corruption in transit. You should use a CRC hash
> or something like that to detect corruption in transit.
>
I mostly agree. PACK/UNPACK were designed for a reliable repository
such as local DASD. I (and many of the followups) are targeting an
anecdote. But lacking other tools, one of the questions tech support
asks early is, "How many bytes in the file?"
In fact, I'm supplying an MD5 checksum with the archive. But I know
of no facility in base CMS to verify either CRC or MD5. Does MAILABLE
provide any such verification?
> -----Original Message-----
>
> That gives no report of a corrupted file; it quietly pretends it's OK.
> It's effective if the only mechanism by which a file gets corrupted is
> by having a few characters added at the end ("the problem at hand").
> But what if a few characters were deleted, or added at the beginning?
>
> Not the way I like to work.
-- gil
