DBCruncher v1.42
                             ==================

                         written by Mauro Panigada


	It works well also under OS1.3+.

	There is a period of my life when i was very fond of
crunching methods. I wonder how a big file becomes a little one.
So I decided to study the problem, but how? Luckly I found several
articles on a italian magazine which were about crunching.
I began from the beginning: the simpler Static Huffman Encoding, but
my purpose was to reach Dynamic Huffman Encoding and, as waterfall,
Lempel-Ziv-Welch. I never reached that, but the effort was great.

	DB means Dynamic Bushman, I mocked the way used, the Huffman
trees and leaves, and so in my imagination they became little bushes.
And Huffman was a man, the Man of Bush.

	Now it crunches well, but the ratio is very very low (about
40% if the file is very repetitive, but 20% and less for non-ascii
but strange data files).

	It crunches only data, this means the executables will treated
as data and made not executable.

	Because of its low ratio, you can try to crunch a file again,
sometimes you will save other bytes.

	You must pay attention to the kind of file you are crunching:
if it is a file already well frozen, my little cruncher can only lose
bytes: but in crunching mode the internal buffer has the same length of
the original file (supposing the crunched one will be shorter!), so
if loses bytes, it will go out of the buffer, maybe corrupting something.
Normally crunching twice a originally non-crunched file will give a
better result.

	I am sorry tha source code is not so clear as you maybe hope.
As cruncher it is too stupid to be used, but maybe to encrypt and save
some byte....

	When the specified file is a file already crunched with
powerpacker, it will first decrunch it, and then crunch it again. The
file surely will be longer than ppacked.

	Using:

	DBCruncher [coms] <source> [<destination>]

	SOURCE must be given. COMS now is only the re-crunch option.
DESTINATION can be missed. In this case the destination has the same
name and path of the source, but with a suffix added.


For bugs report, advices, etc etc:

	Mauro Panigada
	via del Fringuello 26
	00169 Roma
	ITALY

Or send a email to

L Ascione		 linoascione@hotmail.com