[Info-vax] Cross platform copying strategies

[Steven Schweda]

JF Mezei wrote:

> From within VMS,  COPY and BACKUP to the remote NFS server don't seem to
> convert the variable length files to unix text files.

   I don't do much with NFS on VMS, but, when storing an
attribute-rich VMS file on an attribute-poor NFS server, I
wonder if there may be a conflict between being able to get
the data back as expected on a VMS NFS client system, and
having the data look appropriate as seen on the UNIX(-like)
NFS server itself.  It's not obvious to me that both desires
could be satisfied in any reasonably simple way.

> So, is ZIP the only truly workable option where ZIP will store all files
> properly and I should be able to then FTP a single file in binary mode
> and then unpack it on the target system ?

   Depending on exactly what you mean by "properly", perhaps
so.  NFS might get a Zip archive across intact, as well as
FTP.

> On VMS, is there a way to tell ZIP to take everything in a directory
> structure ? Or must one supply the complete line of files to include in
> the archive ?

Wilm Boerhout wrote:

>    -r   recurse into directories

   Note that Zip on VMS also understands VMS wildcard file
specifications, such as, for example, "[...]*.*;*".  As the
"man" page ("zip.txt") says:

[...]
       Command format.  The basic command format is

              zip options archive inpath inpath ...

       where  archive  is a new or existing zip archive and inpath is
a direc-
       tory or file path optionally including wildcards.  [...]

Everything's complicated, but many things are possible.