Question for file decompression experts

[Steve Summit]

In article <522 at larry.UUCP> jwp at larry.UUCP (Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
>I am using the VMS/Unix compress software available on several archive
>sites, and am unable to decompress on UNix a file compressed on VMS.
>I am getting a "Stack Overflow" in the decompress routine.

I had the same problem (same symptom, even) when bringing up
compress under MS-DOS.  I had forgotten to indicate that the file
should be read in "binary" as opposed to "text" mode.  (One of
DOS'es innumerable misfeatures is that it makes this
distinction.)  The failure mode under DOS (which I didn't trace
through, because setting binary mode made it go away immediately)
would have been that a carriage return/line feed sequence (two
characters) in the compressed file would have been seen by the
decompress program as a single line feed.  It's difficult to
imagine how a Unix-based decompress could be bitten by this
problem, unless:

     1.	the VMS compress used the wrong text vs. binary mode, or
     2.	the file was corrupted (CR/LF games) during the transfer
	from VMS to Unix (most likely).  Did you use FTP?  Did
	you remember to set binary mode?

It seems that decompress should be more robust in the face of
corrupted input (crashing with a stack overflow is fairly
graceless), but the algorithm (with which I am unfamiliar) may
make recovery difficult.

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.pika.mit.edu