OpenVMS VAMP Board

Rule 1: You must be using an ODS-5 disk, anything else will not work and will cause more trouble than it is worth.

Rule 2: Enable extended parsing in your login.com (SET PROC/PARSE=EXTEND) or the unzipped files will mangle.

Rule 3: Use GZIPped distributions rather than ZIP files as this will prove more reliable.

Rule 4: Use the GNU version of TAR contained in GNV, e.g. (bash$ gnutar -xzvf package.tar.gz)

I found that even extended parse is insufficient when the file name includes a dot. For instance, the file in the zip is "my.great.file". The unzip from info-zip will preserve the lower case with extended parse, but will change the first dot to an underscore.

I wrote a command procedure that scans the listing from the zip file (which shows the true file name) and renames each file that should have multiple dots (from my_great.file to my^.great.file).

Not my favourite, but very handy in this situation: Use JAVA to explode the zipfile. It will preserve multiple dots in the filename, allow dots in the directory name if required, but will leave the extracted files in STREAM_LF record format, which can be a problem. (Thanks to Aplhaman who gave me the idea)

Use JAVA to unpack ZIP archives,

jar xvf archive.zip

The trick to getting jar working right is to make sure the java$filename_controls logical is set correctly. Out of the box that logical is set to -1, which means it will do the underscore for multiple dots translation, and a host of other fun file tricks. By defining the logical like so... you turn off all the dot replacements. Look at JAVA$FILENAME_CONTROLS.COM in the Java COM directory for a full explanation of what numbers do what for filename translations.