next release

[jbo]

Could you share with us what improvements we can look forward to in the next release of PACL?

Thanks

[spwolf]

If you have any suggestions, please let us know. There is no set wishlist right now.

thanks,

[jbo]

I have a few suggestions that I think would add some great value.

1. Support for archives larger than 2GB. Right now one of the main reasons I haven't considering switching my command line zip software to PACL is for just this reason. The ability to create massive archives 5GB+ with over 25000+ files would be nice.

2. Return codes. I'd like to see a wider varierty of return codes to discern errors. Returns such as crc errors, disk is full, nothing to zip, no zip file exists, can not create file (during extraction), can not create zip file (useful for permission problems), process aborted by user, etc etc would be helpful in troubleshooting.

3. Improved logging support. I'd like to be able to generate logs that are similar to the output produced when you view a zip archive. I'd like to see the same results for the source contents of what you are going to compress, and the destination of what you just extracted. Very useful for maintaining logs that have a consistent look and feel, and that contain useful information size as byte size, individual file compression ratio, and path. Also if the logs could have options to display to screen and/or file.

Thanks

[spwolf]

Hi,

We will start working on next mid update to PACL.

Few things to note:
1. PA since 3.5 supports unlimited size ZIP archives
2/3 We will do what we can

We will also add support for PAE files as well in our next release of PACL.

thanks

[TBGBe]

According to Manual.txt ( PowerArchiver Command Line (PACL) v3.51 [06/29/2004])

* 1 * ZIP v4.5 format not supported.
* 2 * Large ZIP archives (> 2 GB) are not supported.

Is that wrong?

[jbo]

Well manual.txt is only a minor documentation concern from my standpoint. Last night I created a zip file with pacomp.exe that was around 14GB, and was unable to open it with PowerArchiver 9. When I attempted to extract it with paext.exe it appeared to process (and very quickly) but it didn't extract anything (nor did the screen output display any files).

This is where a variety of exit codes would come in handy to see why it didn't extract. I tested this on a machine with an athlon xp 2700, a serial ata hd, and 1.5 gb of ram. Machine performance certainly shouldn't have been a problem.

I've tested this before attempting to zip large files to create massive archives over 5GB with versions 3.50 and 3.51 and have had almost no success extracting the files. This could be in part to the fact most of these files were compressed already, but the type of files I was testing with were the types of files I am expecting to have to deal with to create large archives (file types such as avi and mp3).

[ivan]

PACL supports ZIP v2 standard (not v4.5), so this means it supports archives smaller than 4 GB (but also larger than 2 GB).

Extended ZIP format (v4.5) will not be added so soon to PACL - use PowerArchiver for extremely large archive operations.

[gsbell]

PACOMP.EXE is improperly setting the file dates on compressed files inside the zip to the current date/time.

Is there anyway to prevent that?