Re: NASA 2line Orbital.elem.

Neil Clifford (n.clifford1@physics.oxford.ac.uk)
Mon, 1 Jul 1996 12:49:52 +0100 (BST)

Jeff Hunt scribbles:

|>ftp.physics.ox.ac.uk (Neil Cliffords site) has the
|>capability of downloading them on the fly decompressed in case
|>you are not familiar with the Z compressed format.  Be prepared for a
|>long transfer time if you decompress them on the fly.
|>You can also find the Z compression program for PCs (probably not
|>compatable for Macs) on the kilroy site I believe under the elements
|>subdirectory.  I don't recall if it is listed on Neil's site.

For those unfamiliar, .Z is the suffix associated with the UNIX compress
utility, whilst .gz is that associated with GNU gzip. gzip can
decompress .Z files as well as .gz ones (I prefer to use it as it has
one of the best compression ratios). You can get it at

ftp://ftp.physics.ox.ac.uk/pub/ibmpc/utils/gzip.exe

and elsewhere for an IBM PC compatible. The source code is available
from any GNU archive (eg prep.ai.mit.edu) so if you want it for your Mac
I guess you could try porting it (it builds straight out of the box for
most Unices).

End of public service announcement.

-- 
Neil Clifford                             <n.clifford@physics.oxford.ac.uk>
                        http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/sat/satintro.html