I have sent this to 'support@gzip.org' but thought it may be of
interest to this group, too. I'm not sure if gzip/gunzip is still being
maintained anymore but if it is maybe this could be done?

I have a suggestion for improvments to gzip (or specifically gunzip). I
had a user who appended uncompressed data to a compressed file. Now
when they decompress the file they get the above message. The data is
decompressed OK, but they don't get the decompressed part of the data
(that the user appended to the file) output.

Can the above error message be improved so that the number of bytes of
"trailing garbage" is reported in? This would make it easier to extract
the uncompressed data appended onto the end of the file (tail -c). I
imagine this would be possibly by doing a tell at the point the
compressed data ends?

Jon.

jcombe@acxiom.co.uk wrote:
> I have sent this to 'support@gzip.org' but thought it may be of
> interest to this group, too. I'm not sure if gzip/gunzip is still being
> maintained anymore but if it is maybe this could be done?

There is work needed on gzip that intend to get around to Real Soon
Now.

Of course, one of the beauties of open source is that you can make the
modifications yourself!

> Can the above error message be improved so that the number of bytes of
> "trailing garbage" is reported in?

I'll put that on the list.  Another possibility is a command-line
option to copy the garbage to the output after the decompressed data.
Normally you wouldn't want that since it probably is garbage.  However
gzip allows concatenated gzip streams in one file that it automatically
decompresses to the output.  It is a natural extension of that to
consider uncompressed data at the end a final concatenation.

mark