.Z files (uppercase) are compressed using a simple LZW algorithm. You can unpack them with Compress::LZW or Compress::LZF.

update: oops, it says in the documentation that Compress::LZW does not support .Z files..

use Compress::LZF ':compress';

my $file = shift;
open my $fh, '<', $file or die "Cannot open $file for input: $!\n";

local $/ = undef;
my $decompressed = decompress(<$fh>);
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Update: hmmm, I don't actually have any .Z files around, so I made one, and the above code fails to decompress it, as does Compress::Zlib's uncompress function. Sigh.

Do you have a decompress binary lying around? Or you don't and you really have to do this in Perl? Because if you did, it would probably be much faster to pay the system call and let the binary do the decompression.

Hi

its a small "z" not a Capital "Z"

Still I Tried Compress::LZF as suggested however I got this error

C:\Perl>perl z.pl -I c:/perl/bin
compressed data corrupted (size mismatch) at z.pl line 9, <$fh> chunk 
+1.
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Thanks
Blackadder

Nevertheless, I suspect it's supposed to be a capital Z. I don't suppose you could paste in a hex dump of the first 256 characters or so... It may reveal that the compression isn't ".z" or ".Z" at all.

UPDATE: Wow, just wow. A hex dump would look more like this:

0000000: 4120 6865 7820 6475 6d70 2077 6f75 6c64  A hex dump would
0000010: 206c 6f6f 6b20 6d6f 7265 206c 696b 6520   look more like 
0000020: 7468 6973 3a0a                           this:.
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Of course, your tools may differ from xxd.

-Paul

The Archive::Tar module can optionally use Compress::Zlib (via the IO::Zlib module) to access tar files that have been compressed with gzip. Unfortunately tar files compressed with the Unix compress utility cannot be read by Compress::Zlib and so cannot be directly accesses by Archive::Tar.

If the uncompress or gunzip programs are available, you can use one of these workarounds to read .tar.Z files from Archive::Tar

IT WORKED,....Thanks for all the replies

I used "Gunzip.exe" on the .z files!

Here is the full code

#! c:/perl/bin/perl.exe
#
# By a PerlMonk
#
use strict;

use Archive::Tar;

my $tar = Archive::Tar->new();

system(cls);

opendir (DIR, $ARGV[0]) || die "\nInvalid path $ARGV[0]!\n";

my @path = readdir (DIR);

for my $comp_file (@path)
{
    next if ($comp_file eq '.' || $comp_file eq '..');
    
    my $temp_path = "$ARGV[0]\\$comp_file";
    
    `gunzip.exe  $temp_path`    if ($comp_file =~ /\.z$/);
    
    my $tar = Archive::Tar->new();
    
    $tar->read("$temp_path", 1);
    
    @_ = $tar->list_files();
    
    for my $compressed (@_)
    {
        next unless ($compressed =~ /modinfo.txt/);
        
        $tar->extract_file( $compressed, "$ARGV[0]\\extracted_modinfo.
+txt");
        
        open(FILE,"$ARGV[0]\\extracted_modinfo.txt") || warn "$!: Cann
+ot access temp file\n";
        
        chomp (my @vx_data = <FILE>);
        
        for my $vx (@vx_data)
        {
            next unless ($vx =~ /vx/);
        
            $vx =~ s/^\s+//;
            
            $vx =~ /(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\w+)\s+\(
+(.+)\)$/;
            
            printf "%s, %s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,(%s)\n",$comp_file,$1,$2,$3,
+$4,$5,$6,$7;
        }
        close (FILE);
        unlink ("$ARGV[0]\\extracted_modinfo.txt");    
        }
}
[download]

Thanks again "feel an urge for a donation now! :-)"
Blackadder

If it really is a (lowercase) .z and not (uppercase) .Z, then Wikipedia's List_of_archive_formats says that's Huffman_coding ("officially" called "pack"), so maybe Algorithm::Huffman would help.

Spot on. Thanks indeed

VIVA PERLMONKS.


Blackadder