GAP archive formats

Formats of Archives on the GAP Sites

.zoo

This is the traditional archive format of the GAP distribution, it can be used on UNIX, Windows and Mac. For unpacking you need a special version of unzoo which is available here (it unpacks text files with the native line breaks for each supported operating system):

• unzoo.c for UNIX systems, compile with: cc -o unzoo -DSYS_IS_UNIX unzoo.c
• unzoo.exe for Windows systems
• unzoo4r5.sit for MacOS systems

Using this unzoo program the contents of an XXX.zoo archive can be listed with

      unzoo -l XXX.zoo

and the archive can be unpacked with

      unzoo -x XXX.zoo

(some warnings about directories which cannot be created can safely be ignored).

.tar.gz

The most used archive format under UNIX, a tar-archive compressed with GNU gzip. For unpacking you need the utility programs tar and gzip. The contents of an archive XXX.tar.gz can be listed with

      gzip -dc XXX.tar.gz | tar tv

and the archive can be unpacked with

      gzip -dc XXX.tar.gz | tar xpv

.tar.bz2

This is the most recommended format, a tar-archive compressed with bzip2, because this is the format with the best compression rate. For unpacking you need the utility programs tar and bzip2. The contents of an archive XXX.tar.bz2 can be listed with

      bzip2 -dc XXX.tar.bz2 | tar tv

and the archive can be unpacked with

      bzip2 -dc XXX.tar.bz2 | tar xpv

-win.zip

This is a standard archive format used with Windows. Use your favourite unzip utility for unpacking such archives. The text files in these archives have DOS/Windows line breaks.

The archives can also be unpacked on UNIX systems with the unzip utility. But note that you must do it with the command line option unzip -a such that line breaks in text files are changed to UNIX standard (if you forget the option, some files will not work under UNIX).