Aye, from what I have read about these packed files here, it seems to me
to be much like the various compressed file formats in use on Linux/Unix
(.z, .gz, .bz, .xz, etc), except that perhaps the CMS pack tool neglects
to modify the file name extension to indicate that this is now a packed
file. That means the "native" way to deal with these on Linux would be
to implement some "cmspack" utility which can pack/unpack such files (as
was indicated, the assembler source code is available so it's easy to
figure out how to do this and reimplement it in a bit of C code), and
teach the file command about this file format so it can correctly report it.
Trying to "hide" this by having the cms-fuse file system somehow
"transparently" do the unpacking on these files seems to me to be the
wrong approach and not fitting the Linux philosophy. So yes, I would
hope the cms-fuse developers would push back on such an idea. Linux/Unix
does not have a notion of "file type" in the operating system. All
files are a stream of bytes, and if you open a file, you get that exact
stream of bytes. If said stream of bytes happens to be in some
compressed format, you are expected to handle this at the
user/application level, e.g. by opening the file with the suitable
uncompress tool, and piping the (uncompressed) output of that to the
program that you want to process the uncompressed file data.
Willy
On 05/19/2016 10:41 PM, Neale Ferguson wrote:
We could teach the “file" command on linux to recognize such files. It
just uses signature-type information.
On 5/19/16, 4:27 PM, "Linux on 390 Port on behalf of Scott Rohling"
<[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:
If I 'browse' (or TYPE for that matter) a COPYFILE packed file - it looks
much the same as it did from the Linux...
That being said - if I was the cms-fuse developer I would probably push
back on this... just because XEDIT was smart and did the unpack
internally doesn't mean the driver should try and do the same. Isn't the
onus on the application opening the file to read it correctly - just as it
is in under CMS? Is cms-fuse supposed to incorporate the unpack? What
about terse, vmarc, et al? Seems like a slippery slope unless I just
plain misunderstood you. (never happens :-)
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