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9.25) mpack/munpack |
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This article is from the AmigaUUCP
FAQ, by Marc SCHAEFER,
mpack is a program for encoding binary files and sending them through the mail and news. The messages it creates follow the MIME (see the MIME section in this FAQ for more information) format outlined in RFCs 1521 and 1522. Being of more recent design, it has several technical advantages over messages containing uuencoded files. It was designed to send binaries through mail and news, and it is easier to use than raw uuencode for posting.
munpack is the unpacker that goes with mpack. It has many of the same advantages over uudecode that mpack has over uuencode. The one drawback is that you cannot save all the parts of an mpack posting in one file to be fed to munpack. munpack must be able to distinguish the separate messages from each other in some way. The obvious advantages - not having to save the messages at all, not having to worry about what order you process them in, and being able to process parts from two postings in intermixed order - outweigh this disadvantage.
Exactly how you unpack an mpack archive depends on your news reader. The hard - but always possible - way is to save the each part of an mpack message as a separate file and run munpack with those files as arguments. As stated above, you must put each part in a separate file, but order doesn't matter. You can save multiple multipart postings in a directory, cd to that directory and issue the command "munpack `list lformat %p%n`".
If your newsreader supports MIME format messages, it may decode and unpack mpacked files without any action on your part, or it may require you to issue a command to process each part as a MIME message. If it does not support MIME format messages, the easiest way to unpack mpacked files is to arrange to run munpack on each message from inside your newsreader. Details of how this is done depend on your newsreader.
The central release mechanism for mpack and munpack is FTP from export.acs.cmu.edu, in the directory pub/mpack. This directory has MS-DOS, Mac and Amiga binaries, as well as sources for those and the Unix version. Amiga-specific distributions are also available via BMS from various sites, including contessa.phone.net and adastra.cvl.va.us. If none of those work, the maintainer of the Amiga version can be contacted via email to mwm@contessa.phone.net, and will send you a uuencoded version of munpack.
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