Re: file uncompression with native Windows Emacs

[B. T. Raven]

On 12/8/2016 19:29, Will Parsons wrote:
> I'm confused about what I should expect for file uncompression with
> native Windows Emacs.  I'm running:
>
> GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (i686-w64-mingw32)
>
> Curiously, if I visit a file compressed with bzip2, Emacs has no
> problem opening it, but if I visit a file compressed with gzip, Emacs
> complains that "Uncompression program 'gzip' not found".
>
> How is this supposed to work?  I don't see any compression binaries
> packages in the Emacs installation directory, but I do have an
> ezwinports directory that contains bzip2 utilities, so perhaps Emacs
> is using that (but how does it know?)  If ezwinports is the source of
> bzip2 for Emacs, I don't see similar gzip utilities, so I'm quite
> confused.

ezwinports is probably in your path. Type "where bzip2.exe" to see if 
this is so. A couple of gzip binaries for w32 are here:

http://www.gzip.org/   ;; put them one of them in the same directory 
where bzip2 is now and emacs should find it.

It looks like you need both bzip2 and bunzip2 (and maybe 
bzip2recover.exe plus a dll in case something goes wrong). gzip 
decompresses with the -d switch. Since gzip is older it's probably more 
reliable but I don't know much about it since I use only decompression 
(usually with 7-zip).

Ed