Bug 415561 – p7zip documentation/behaviour mismatch

• Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description PetaMem R&D 2012-05-12 10:49:53 UTC]

p7zip docs (man p7zip) say:

"p7zip - Wrapper on 7za, a 7-zip file archiver with high compression ratio"
...
"7-Zip  is a file archiver with the highest compression ratio. The program supports 7z (that implements LZMA compression algorithm), ZIP, CAB, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats."

However, if I test this claim, I get meagre results:

 p7zip -d test.gz
-> unknown suffix
 p7zip -d test.zip
-> unknown suffix
 p7zip -d test.bz2
-> zunknown suffix
etc. etc.

Seems either obsolete docs, wrong wrapper or omeone overpromising. ;-)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. call p7zip -d <file with any extension mentioned in docs except 7z>
2. press return
3. read program output
Actual Results:  
disappointing

Expected Results:  
less disappointing

[Comment 1 Justin Lecher (RETIRED) 2012-05-12 11:02:44 UTC]

Please use 7z. p7zip is only the wrapper to handle plain 7z archives.

[Comment 2 PetaMem R&D 2012-05-12 13:00:23 UTC]

I disagree.

Then the p7zip documentation is wrong.

[Comment 3 Michael Orlitzky 2012-05-12 22:02:37 UTC]

This is a real bug, the 'p7zip' wrapper is meant to operate like e.g. gzip for use with tar and other utilities.

At the moment, the man page is wrong. However, it looks like the script is just being lazy, and could be modified to support other extensions:

case "${file}" in
    *.7z)
      if [ -f "${file}" ] ; then
        # It handles 7z here...
    ;;
    *)
      echo "$0: ${file}: unknown suffix"
      exit 1
    ;;
esac


It's upstream, either way.

[Comment 4 Michael Orlitzky 2012-05-12 22:07:55 UTC]

Reported:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3526181&group_id=111810&atid=660493

[Comment 5 Justin Lecher (RETIRED) 2012-05-13 14:01:57 UTC]

Thanks for reporting upstream.