Filetypes and dealing with files of various types

6.1 A quick note about ProDOS filetypes

ProDOS keeps some information about a file's type. Files can be text
(TXT), binary (BIN), executable (SYS), fonts (FON), etc. Most other
file systems do not have a place to store this information, so it may
get 'lost' when you upload the file. Similarly, when you download a
file, you may not know the file type. Most comm programs will use some
default. For NuFX archives, this is not a big deal, since you can
still unpack an archive if the filetype is wrong (and the archive
protects the filetype of the files inside the archive). For other
files, you may need to change the file's type. One utility that comes
well recommended is File Attribute Zapper II.

ftp://apple2.archive.umich.edu/apple2/8bit/util/fazz.2.3.bsq

6.2 Net standard formats

There are several formats that are used widely on the Internet. The
most common in FTP sites are tar (.tar) and compress (.Z). From a unix
box, to undo a Tape Archive, type 'tar -xvf filename.tar', to undo a
compress, type 'uncompress filename.Z'. Since tar does not make the
file smaller, and compress can only compress 1 file, many times you
will find files that are 'tarred an feathered'. They have a '.tar.Z'
extension. Just run uncompress then un-tar the result. Other USENET
groups will use uuencode (.uu) to send binaries. From a unix box, just
type 'uudecode file.uu'. BinSCII is better than uuencode because 1) It
stores the ProDOS filetype. 2) It splits the file into manageable 12K
chunks. 3) It does a CRC checksum on each chunk.

Most of these 'Unix' standard formats are available on the Apple. See
the table below.

Format Types
+-------------------------------------------------------+
|NuFX|Bin |uuen-|com- |.ZOO|Bin |LZH/| Stuff| ARC| Other|
Program | ||SCII|code |press||Hex |LHA | -It|||
--------|-|----|----|-----|-----|----|----|----|------|----|------|
Angel[1]|e||||X|X || X||X | .ZIP |
BSC|c||E |||||||||
Balloon |g|X ||||||||||
Binscii |e||X |||||||||
DeArc|e|||||||||D ||
GSCII+|g||X |X||| D|||| .AAF |
GShk|g|X |||D|D |||D|D ||
LHext|x||||||| D? ||||
Nulib|c|X ||||||||||
PMPUnzip|x|||||||||| .ZIP |
SciiBin |c||D |||||||||
Shrinkit|e|X ||||||||||
Spectrum|g||X |||| X|||||
sscii|x||X |X||| X|||||
(Key:E = Encode only,D = Decode only,X = Encode and Decode)
(Type:e = Apple //e,g = GS Only,x = GS EXE file, c = C Source code)
[1] Angel is pretty Buggy, but it's worth a try.

Where to get those programs listed above