DWC

Revision as of 12:49, 12 January 2013

(From the Introduction in the DWC documentation)

DWC is an archive utility patterned after ARC, (C) Copyright System Enhancement Assoc., that has many improvements and added features. Please note, however, that DWC is Not file compatible with ARC and cannot be used to add or extract ARC files.

Basic improvements include compression speed and size, and error handling. Also, DWC includes all of ARC's commands and options (except the run command) and adds many new ones along with small improvements over the old ones. These are detailed below.

DWC attempts to emulate ARC's interface and functionality so Users do not need to learn a new style. New features are added as a super-set to ARC's features.

DWC was created by Dean W. Cooper in 1986 as a higher performance alternative to the ARC (both ARC & PKARC) and ZOO file archiving tools. The file COMPARE.DOC in the reference linked below shows comparisons for both compression and time improvements over DWCs erstwhile competitors.

In 1988 the source code for the compressor/decompressor was sold to a company called DS Technologies.

Identifiers

• File extension: .DWC
• MIME type (Internet media type): Has no specific registered type; generic binary application/octet-stream is generally used, or perhaps unregistered custom types with an x- prefix

References

• A DWC utility at CD.Textfiles.com
• Archive format info, including DWC