Installing Applications from Compressed Archives


Just as you use Disk Copy to mount disk images, you use a decompression utility to make the contents of compressed archives installable. Until quite recently, a Mac user would rarely encounter a compressed archive in any format other than that of Aladdin Systems’ StuffIt Deluxe. In the rare situation where a user encountered a WinZip file, the free StuffIt Expander would decompress WinZip as well. While there were other compressors and archivers (Disk Doubler and Compact Pro, to name two), anything other than .SIT (StuffIt) or .ZIP (WinZip) was extremely uncommon.

Thanks to the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, a couple of other formats are becoming semistandard. As noted in Chapter 26, tar files are the Unix standard for archiving, and compression is achieved with compress or gzip. gzip files typically have a .gz file name extension and compressed files have a .z extension. The multitalented StuffIt Expander also recognizes these formats and decompresses and expands tar archives, although some other utilities, such as OpenUp — a freeware offering by Scott Anguish, obtained from www.stepwise.com/ Software/OpenUp/ — also decompresses these formats. If you have both StuffIt Expander and OpenUp, you should be ready for just about any compressed archive that comes your way.

To install from a compressed archive, decompress the archive and then extract the archive’s contents. If there are installation instructions (such as a Unix script to run in a Terminal shell), follow them. If there are no installation instructions, just drag the application where you want it, remembering that you might need administrator privileges to install it in the Applications folder.




Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
ISBN: 0764543997
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 290

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