CFOG's PIP, November 1987, Volume 6 No. 1, Whole No. 61, page 1
Crunch Version 2.4
by Benjamin H. Cohen
Copyright 1987 by Benjamin H. Cohen. All rights reserved.
Crunch and Uncrunch version 2.4 are here. These are two superb utilities that will make the compression and decompression of files a lot less tedious than in the past.
Crunch 'crunches' files: it generally makes them smaller than the squeeze algorithins that we're used to. Text files commonly compress tot less than 50 per cent of their original size. Crunch is easy to use. Just issue the command to crunch, the location of the file you want to crunch in du: format, the name of the file, and the destination. For example, to crunch the file PCD.NDX that's on drive B: in user area 4 over to a floppy disk in drive C: in user area 0, issue this cominand line:
crunch b4:pcd.ndx c0:[cr]
You can, if you want to, add a comment to the file is it's being crunched, adding a space after the destination designation and putting the comment in brackets. The comment can be read by typing the file and is displayed when it is uncrunched.
The beauty of version 2.4 lies in its use with wildcards and the confirm option. When you have a bunch of files that you want moved to another location you can enter a wildcard command to crunch them. If you add the "/c" parameter (confirm) you'll be in a 'filesweep' mode, tagging the ones you want crunched just like NewSweep.
There's more: if the file is already crunched or squeezed, Crunch 2.4 will copy the file to the indicated destination.
When uncrunching, version 2.4 also unsqueezes squeezed files and copies non-compressed files. There's a cofirm mode for uncrunching, too.
Crunch and Uncrunch work quite quickly. You can dump USQ and SQ from your utility disks, since there's not much point in squeezing files when you can crunch them and Uncrunch does the job of your fast unsqueezer.