NetRexx: Unpacking NetRexx packages

Unpacking NetRexx packages

The NetRexx packages are shipped in two forms, identified by a suffix following the name:

.zip format -- commonly used on OS/2 and other operating systems for the IBM PC
.tar.Z format -- (tape archive plus compress) commonly used on AIX and other Unix systems.

You probably know how to handle these, but a word of caution: the packages contain directory structures, and files with 'long names' (that is, not of 8.3 maximum length names) which are case-sensitive. Many utilities, including some versions of UNZIP and TAR, can lose case information, truncate names, or fail to restore directories.

Unpacking .zip files

The most common packages for 'unzipping' these are Info-ZIP and PKZIP: Here are some tips:

Ensure that you are unzipping to a disk that supports long file names (for example, an HPFS disk or equivalent on OS/2 or Windows).
Info-ZIP: use version 5.12 (August 1994) or later. The syntax for unzipping NetRexx.zip is simply
```
  unzip NetRexx
```
which should create the files and directory structure directly. Please see later in this document for complete installation instructions.
PKZIP: use a version that supports long file names. The syntax for unzipping NetRexx.zip is
```
  pkunzip -d NetRexx
```
which should create the files and directory structure directly. The '-d' flag indicates that directory structure should be preserved.

Unpacking .tar.Z files

You need an up-to-date version of two programs: 'tar' and 'uncompress'; these are available for most operating systems. Here are some tips:

Ensure that you are unpacking to a disk that supports long file names (for example, any Unix disk, or an HPFS disk or equivalent on OS/2 or Windows).
Ensure that the version of tar that you use preserves case in names. If all the files created by tar have all-lowercase names, you need a new version of tar.

The process of unpacking the file takes two steps:

Uncompress the file, using uncompress (this may be called simply 'compress' on some systems). The syntax for uncompressing NetRexx.tar.Z is probably one of:
```
  uncompress  NetRexx.tar.Z
  compress -d NetRexx.tar.Z
```
(the '-d' means decompress, and may be optional). This should replace the file with one called NetRexx.tar
Unpack the files and directories from the .tar file. The syntax for this is
```
  tar -xvf NetRexx.tar
```
This should create the files and directories from the package, displaying the name of each as it is unpacked. You may see error messages where directories already exist; these can be ignored.

After unpacking the files, the .tar file can be erased.

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