[NCLUG] uncompress error - corrupt file

[S. Luke Jones]

Back in the day (approximately 1988(?)) I made a bunch of compressed
cpio archives. (Yes, today we use tar, but tar wasn't invented where
I worked at the time, so we didn't use it.)

My problem today is twofold: (1) nobody uses uncompress anymore,
because nobody uses compress, because the geniuses at Unisys think
their patent is so hot.  Luckily, gunzip and zcat understand how to
uncompress old .Z files so that problem is solved.

Which leads to (2) the file appears to be corrupt. I get:

	insize:1029 posbits:3042 inbuf:8E 44 77 B5 54 (2)
	uncompress: corrupt input

(By the way, on the files that (appear to) survive decompression,
I usually get a message like:

	cpio: premature end of file

which I take to mean there's rampant corruption but of a minor
-- not to say recoverable -- type.)

Can anyone suggest a way to repair these files? Probably what
happened is that sometime between then and now I forgot to pay
attention to binary vs. ascii encoding or some equally dumb
stunt and now I'm picking up the pieces.

-- 
Luke Jones = luke/vortex/frii/fullstop/com