On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:53 AM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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?" I think the purpose of PACK (when implemented in COPYFILE) was to reduce the disk space occupied by the data. Simple run length encoding was probably best you could with slow CPU and limited memory (all before LZW, I presume). Transfer between systems was not an issue because there was only one system to most folks. Since then we discovered that it's helpful that PACK can protect record boundaries on hostile transfer media. CMS Pipelines does the pack/unpack to simplify reading and processing packed files.That's extremely helpful when you process files that are archived on disk in packed form. Rob
