This ftp archive allows for a number of important features on the fly. Complete directory tree retrieval You may retrieve an entire directory subtree as an archive file using get DIRNAME.EXT where DIRNAME is the name of the directory file, and EXT is the name of the archiving mechanism you wish to retrieve. Supported archiving extensions include: .tar -- standard UNIX tar archives (GNU tar) .tar.Z -- LZW (UNIX "compress") compressed tar archive .tar.bz2 -- bzip2 compressed tar archive (most compact, but slow to bunzip2) .tar.gz -- gzip compressed UNIX tar archive (uses gzip 1.2.4) .tar.z -- gzip compressed UNIX tar archive (uses gzip 1.2.4) .tgz -- gzip compressed UNIX tar archive (uses gzip 1.2.4) .trz -- gzip compressed UNIX tar archive (uses gzip 1.2.4) .zip -- Info-ZIP platform-independent ZIP archive (uses ZIP 1.9) .zoo -- platform independent ZOO archive (uses ZOO 2.10) Sources and selected executables for the archiving tools for various platforms are available in the /pub/misc directory tree. For example, to retrieve all files in a ZIP archive within the directory /pub/vax/vmstar (the VMSTAR distribution), use: cd /pub/vax/vmstar binary get vmstar.zip This will create vmstar.zip on your system, which will UNZIP to create the sub-directory vmstar on your system (if it does not already exist), then place all files within that directory into the vms sub-directory on your system. Replace the extension .zip with any of the extensions identified above as being supported. Note that binary mode should be used to transfer these files. Automatic compression and decompression Some files are retained in compressed format on this archive (shown by by filenames such as FILENAME.Z, FILENAME.z or FILENAME.gz). To retrieve the file in uncompressed format, use: get FILENAME and the file FILENAME.bz2, FILENAME.Z, FILENAME.z, or FILENAME.gz will be uncompressed prior to transferring it to your system. Compressed tar files named FILENAME.tar.Z, FILENAME.tar.bz2, FILENAME.tar.gz, FILENAME.tgz, or FILENAME.trz can be dynamically decompressed by get FILENAME.tar Alternately, many files are archived in uncompressed format (shown by a a filename such as FILENAME which does not end in .Z, .bz2, .z, or .gz). To retrieve the file in compressed format, use one of: get FILENAME.Z get FILENAME.bz2 get FILENAME.gz get FILENAME.z and the file FILENAME will be compressed prior to transferring it to your system. In the case of the ".Z" extension, the compression technique is the LZW (Unix "compress") method. In the case of the ".bz2" extension, the compression technique is bunzip2 (available at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/bzip2/index.html). In the case of the ".z" or ".gz" extensions, the compression technique is GNU's gzip. Getting a listing of a ZIP archive file To get a listing of the contents within a ZIP archive file, such as foo.zip use: get foo.zip-lst and the contents will be written to this file as it is created, then transferred to your system. Searching through the whole archive To search for a file of a given name in the complete archive listing use: quote site index string where "string" is your search string. Note that this will NOT work if you entered a `-' as the first character of your password. The searching is done with the GNU implementation of the UNIX egrep regular-expression search utility against the file /INDEX; details are in README.site-commands. Getting archive and (de)compression software You can find source code for arc, zip, and zoo in the directory /pub/misc, and implementations for DEC VMS in /pub/vax. gzip, tar, and other GNUware can be found on ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu, and at sites that mirror it.