nomarch lists, extracts, or tests `.arc' archives. (An alternate
extension sometimes used was `.ark'; these work too.) This is a
very outdated file format which should certainly not be used for anything
new, but you may still need an extraction utility, and here it is. :-)
The default action is to extract all files in the specified archive;
see
OPTIONS below for how to do other things instead.
OPTIONS
-h
give terse usage help.
-l
list files in archive. If verbose listings are enabled, it shows the
filename, compression method, compressed/uncompressed size, date/time,
and CRC; but by default, it just shows the filename, uncompressed
size, and date/time.
-p
extract to standard output, rather than to separate files.
-t
test files in archive (more precisely, check file CRCs).
-U
use uppercase filenames; more precisely, preserve original case from
archive.
-v
give verbose output (when used with
` -l ').
archive.arc
the archive to operate on.
match1 " etc."
optionally specify which archive members to list/extract/test. Those
which match any of these filenames/wildcards are processed. Wildcard
operators supported are shell-like `*' and `?', but don't forget to
quote arguments which use these (e.g.
` nomarch "foo.arc '*.bar'" ').
EXTRACTING MULTIPLE ARCHIVES
nomarch follows the `unzip'-like practice of working on only one
archive per run, with further `filenames' given on the command-line
actually specifying files to extract (or whatever). The easiest way to
work on multiple files with nomarch is simply to run it multiple
times using
for ; for example:
for i in *.arc; do nomarch $i; done
The above would extract all archives in the current directory.
USING THE PROGRAM FROM EMACS
Emacs's arc-mode facility lets you work with various kinds of archive
file directly from the editor. Though it defaults to using the old
non-free `arc' program at the time of writing, making it use nomarch
for extracting `.arc' files isn't too hard. Just add the following to
your
"~/.emacs" file:
(setq archive-arc-extract '("nomarch" "-U"))
BUGS
The CRC used by the format is only 16-bit, so
` -t ' is a less-than-perfect test.
One compression method, obsolete even by `.arc' standards :-), isn't
supported yet. This is partly because I've yet to find a single file
which uses it, despite testing an awful lot of files.
Subdirectories in Spark archives are extracted as the `.arc'-format
files they really are, which may not be terribly convenient.
