Re: [vox-tech] Decompressing large files

[Eric Engelhard <ekengelhard@sagresMAPSdiscovery.com>]

Micah Cowan wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 02:18:20PM -0800, Eric Engelhard wrote:
> > I am decompressing large (>1GB compressed) genome sequence files. I have
> > plenty of free space on a fast scsi and 256MB of RAM. When I tried to to
> > use "uncompress filename.Z" or "gzip -d filename.Z" I got a write error
> > each time. The solution (well, MY solution) was to use the "-c" option
> > with uncompress and pipe the output to a specified file. Does anyone
> > know enough about uncompress to tell me why this solves the problem?
> > --
> > Eric
> 
> I don't, but offhand I'd say that uncompress doesn't handle writes as
> stablely (if that's a word :) ) as bash does.  Which makes sense to
> me, since uncompress is known to not verify compressed input files,
> according to the gzip (i think) manpage.  After all, isn't the only
> difference between uncompress filename.Z and uncompress -c, etc. the
> fact that uncompress is/isn't handling the actual disk io?
> 
> Micah

Yes, the "-c" option sends everything to stdout.

also (from the uncompress man page):

BUGS
       Although  compressed files are compatible between machines
       with large memory, -b12 should be used for  file  transfer
       to  architectures with a small process data space (64KB or
       less, as exhibited by the DEC PDP series, the Intel 80286,
       etc.)

Learning something new every hour or so.
-- 
Eric