On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:28:18 +0000 (UTC), thanatoid
wrote:

Why are you afraid of a totally harmless program?

If I don't answer that, I hope you won't mind, and also won't
infer that there is no answer that could have been given.

Just do SOMETHING.

I thought I just had. I re-read through that entire long WinZip
thread, and compiled a list of every single suggestion made. I
uninstalled Spybot. (No problems there.) I installed 7-Zip. I
created several of my usual backup archives using 7-Zip, copied
them over the LAN in the normal way, and opened them with WinZip
on the other PC. No path data!

Here's an experiment. Consider the following structure of files
and directories [folders - I prefer 'directories' myself, as do
you, but, in a Windows context, it often seems less fussy to use
the Windows term], which you can easily reproduce on your system:


A a directory (at partition root level, say)
x.txt an arbitrary file in A
B a subdirectory of A
y.txt an arbitrary file in B


Go into A, and "add" file x to an archive, located somewhere or
other. (I don't know if there is a convenient way to tell 7-Zip
to make its archives in some preferred location. With WinZip,
I used to create an empty archive, where I wanted it, and add
files to it incrementally. There is nothing odd about the idea
of an empty archive, or empty container of any kind. Boundary
cases should be handled in a regular manner. This is a common
wisdom in both mathematics and computer science, e.g. when de-
bugging programs. Mathematics is full of empty or null objects
such as zero, and programs are full of loops which sometimes
are executed zero times. Text files containing no characters
exist as proper files. And so on.)

Now go into B, and "add" y to the same archive. Does path
data for x and y not get lost? What am I doing wrong? With
WinZip, you could move around in the file system and add data
incrementally to an archive, like this, and path information
would be preserved. It is part of my normal backup procedure,
and I would be lost with a program that does not do this.

And never mind the **** left behind by WinZip. It'll just sit
there.

I expect so.

One thing at a time.

Amen.

--
Angus Rodgers