A lot of files and programs available on the Internet are specially squashed or compressed (archived), so before you can use them you have to uncompress them.
The most popular compression method is called ZIP (though there are many others like Arc, Spk, Gzip, LHZ, etc.). Thankfully ZIP is in the public domain so there are many free programs around that can allow you to decompress any ZIP file, including any found on a PC or Mac machine.
The most common decompression program on the RISC OS platform is called SparkPlug by David Pilling.
While it can decompress quite a wide range of compressed software, there is a excellent piece of commerical software called SparkFS which can handle virtually every compressed format to be found and allows you to create your own files too.
There are also some free ZIP file creators to be found. The best on RISC OS is probably ZipEE based around the free ZIP module by InfoZip.
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!Sparkplug. |
V2.26 (86K) freeware decompression program by David Pilling.
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!ZipEE. |
V1.48 (190K) A freeware frontend for the InfoZip modules which allows you to create and unpack ZIP archives. By John Pettigrew.
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Latest 32bit Zip modules. |
V2.3 (302K) by InfoZip. Ported to RISC OS by Stefan Bellon.
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Zip by InfoZip is a command line Public Domain Zip compression program compatible with PKZIP/WINZIP (commerical programs used on a PC) files which allows you to create and unpack ZIP archives which appear with a '.zip' postfix on the Internet (It can also open PC '.exe' files). |
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Other useful decompression programs are:
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!Gzip | V1.2.3 (300K) A file containing Gzip, a program which allows unpacking of files with the rare '.gz' postfix that appear on some Internet sites. |
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!Tar | V1.2b (126K) Tape ARchiving software. Another popular archiving format.
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UnRAR. | (66K) by Stefan Bellon. yet another archiving format.
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LHarc. | by Nick Roberts. This is a UNIX Lha compression program (the Amiga platform tended to use this format). DtLHarc is also there and is the Desktop frontend for it.
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