XARC
                          ARC File Extractor

by Charles Tyson
6/14/87

XARC is a revised version of UNARC, by D. J. James.  UNARC is based
on the main ARC program by Thom Henderson, which is copyright (c) 1985
by System Enhancement Associates, with ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  Gad, I
should put my law degree to work by suing myself for copyright violation.
It's a good thing my worldly fortune approximates the proverbial
bloodless turnip.

XARC is a subset of ARC.  All it can do is extract, or decompress, files
which have been ARCed.  It performs the function you normally use the
"ARC X [arcfile]" command for.  XARC is handier than ARC because
     1) it is much smaller than ARC, and
     2) it won't to horrible things to you if you hit the wrong key
        (did you ever type ARC A #? when you meant ARC X #?)

The syntax for XARC is 

              XARC [arcfile] [arcfile...] [TO pathname]

If you run XARC without any arguments, it reminds you of this syntax.

[arcfile] is the name of an archived file.  The filename must end in ".ARC",
but you don't have to type that in--XARC will append it to the [arcfile]
name you supply.  If [arcfile] isn't in the current directory, precede it
with a pathname.

You can specify more than one file to be unARCed.

The [TO...] clause is optional.  If omitted, XARC will place the extracted
files in the current directory.  If present, XARC will place the extracted
files in the specified drive or directory.  The keyword TO needn't be in
capitals.

The TO command is XARC's reason for existence.  If you forget that UNARC
places the extracted files in the current directory, you can lose them for
days (they like to hide in crowded areas such as C:, or in obscure backwaters
like SYS:Devs/Printers).  With XARC, you can tell those pesky files exactly
where to go.

XARC differs from UNARC in one other respect, which I hope will make no
difference to users.  The source code for ARC/UNARC indicated that a large
chunk of programming was retained solely for compatibility with old versions
of ARC--certain compression methods are no longer used, but ARC/UNARC still
remember how to decompress them.  Since my Lattice-compiled XARC was
getting considerably larger than the Manx-compiled UNARC, I lopped off the
"obsolete" decompression methods to save space.  I haven't found any
files that XARC couldn't handle, but if you get a "I don't know how to
decode this file" message, try using ARC or UNARC on it.