Introduction
------------

PARC is a portable archiving utility based on System Enhancement
Associates' ARC Version 5.21 for MS-DOS.


Leagaleese
----------

PARC is the copyrighted property of Lawrence J. Jones and System
Enhancement Associates, Inc.  You are granted a limited license to use
PARC and to copy and distribute it provided that the following
conditions are met:

1) No fee may be charged for such copying and distribution.

2) PARC may ONLY be distributed in its original, unmodified state.

3) PARC may NOT be distributed, in whole or in part, as part of any
commercial product or service without the express written permission of
the copyright holders.


Release Notes
-------------

By default, PARC uses exactly the same archive format on all systems. 
Since the ARC format was developed on MS-DOS, it limits filenames to an
eight character name and three character extension with no distinction
between upper and lower case -- longer or more complex filenames are
truncated.

When a file is archived, it is converted from whatever the normal text
file format is on the host system to the MS-DOS text file format with
lines separated by a carriage-return line-feed pair.  Similarly, when a
file is extracted, it is converted back to the normal text file format. 
This makes moving text files from one machine to another very easy.
However, it also means that BINARY FILES CAN NOT BE ARCHIVED AND
EXTRACTED ON DIFFERENT SYSTEMS (because of the format conversion that
occurs, the binary data may be changed).

To compensate for this and to provide additional functionality on other
systems, PARC provides one or more image modes which archive and extract
data without any conversion.  Image mode operation is requested by
specifying the "i" flag followed by an optional mode number -- if no
mode number is specified, mode 1 is used; mode 0 is the same as omitting
the i flag.  In mode 1, the file data is stored directly without any
format conversion.  Higher modes may preserve additional information
such as long file names, record structures, etc.  See the release notes
for your particular system for details.

PARC has been enhanced to handle archives created by PKARC which use an
additional compression technique known as Squashing.  Squashed files
will be extracted and listed properly and archives containing squashed
file can be modified, but PARC never uses squashing in the archives it
creates. 

PARC does, however, use the Squeezing compression technique which was
removed from ARC in version 5.21 since it reportedly results in better
compression for some types of files and only slightly increases the
compression time.

A bug in the squeezing code which caused PARC to crash when compressing
large files on some systems has been fixed.

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports about PARC are welcome and should
be directed to:

	Lawrence J. Jones
	701 Woodgate Rd.
	Cincinnati, OH  45244
	(scjones@sdrc.com or ...uunet!sdrc!scjones)

PARC users who are not already familiar with ARC or anyone desiring
additional information about ARC are encouraged to contact:

	System Enhancement Associates
	21 New St.
	Wayne, NJ  07470
	(201)473-5153