Talk:EBZip

ebzip caveats

Intended to be a place to note down issues, as well as tips and tricks with eb-4.4.3.

Hardcoded to look specifically for a file that begins with "CATALOGS" (case-insensitive), or "CATALOGS.ebz"

Custom dictionaries doesn't always follow standard convention to store their content(s), like having "START.ebz" in the top level. Even if they do, they may also compress "CATALOGS" as "CATALOGS.ebz." eb-4.4.3 specifically looks for either "CATALOGS" or "CATALOGS.ebz", and either decompress or compress the files specified within, per user's request, e.g. ebzip -u will tell it to decompress and rename any of the listed files that are noted in either "CATALOGS" or "CATALOGS.ebz", and has ".ebz" extension, ignoring any other files in the same path, and doesn't decompress "CATALOGS.ebz" even if instructed. There are ways to workaround that:

Decompress "CATALOGS.ebz"

In my case,

• Simply rename the decompressed "HONMON" to something like "HONMON.old",
• Copy the "CATALOGS.ebz" there, but have it named as "HONMON.ebz",
• Run decompression via the usual ebzip -u from the top level where it doesn't contain "HONMON.ebz" but only "CATALOGS.ebz",
• Once decompressed, move decompressed "HONMON" (not "HONMON.old") back to where "CATALOGS.ebz" was, have it renamed as "CATALOGS",
• Rename "HONMON.old" back to "HONMON".

Optionally, delete "CATALOGS.ebz" considering that is now redundant.

Decompress other .ebz that were not listed

Same as above, but instead of copying, you can just move it, as,

• ebzip -u will only look for "CATALOGS" or "CATALOGS.ebz", and
• It saves having to manually delete the redundant file(s) afterwards.

Zero-length (un)compressed files not overwritten upon manual intervention

When a path that has zero-length files, but are listed in either "CATALOGS" or "CATALOGS.ebz", ebzip -u for instance may not overwrite it. This may also apply if ebzip -uf is used. To fix this, just delete the zero-length files, ensuring that they have a duplicate file that does not have .ebz extension, then re-run the command. When compressing, the opposite is true, to look for duplicate zero-length files with .ebz extension, delete them and run the utility to compress instead.

On modern Linux environments, these could be achieved via the following:

Enumerating

 find . -size 0 -type f

Deleting

 find . -size 0 -type f -delete

Care must be taken to avoid any potential losses when running this command.

Anonymoususer852 (talk) 10:10, 18 August 2025 (UTC)