need access to old bzip'ed file

[David Teague <dbt@cs.wcu.edu>]

Fellow Debian faithful:

I need to access many backup files that are quite old. These were
compressed with a version of bzip prior to bzip2.  I cannot access them.
Here is what the 'file' utility says about one of them:

$file files/old/elentari/a/refinit.cpp.bz
files/old/elentari/a/refinit.cpp.bz: bzip compressed data, version: 0,
compression block size 900k
$bunzip files/old/elentari/a/refinit.cpp.bz
bash: bunzip: command not found
$bunzip2 files/old/elentari/a/refinit.cpp.bz
bunzip2: files/old/elentari/a/refinit.cpp.bz is not a bzip2 file.


I have looked but I cannot find a version of bzip before bzip2. If I find
a binary (I have binary Debian CDs back to 0.93) I won't be able to run it
because libraries aren't that backward compatible.

If I find the sources for the earlier version of bzip, shouldn't I be able
to compile and run it?

David Teague

I use Linux because it runs with a probability of failure that is
much lower than the hardware failure rate.
Debian Linux because the help that is free, fast, accurate and useful.