>>in. WinZip, made by Nico Mak Computing, has them, documented only on their
>>web site, and they are inadequate if you want to do much. It's better to
>>use a real programming tool like DynaZip anyway.
>
>Is there any decent archiving utility which supports listfiles (i.e.
>text files containing a list of files to include). In DOS I usually have
>some pack_it.cmd consisting of
>*.prg
>*.sc?
>*.fr?
>*.pj?
>....etc, so I don't archive the tables, .txt, .bak etc - for tables, I
>use a similar file, with all the .dbf, .fpt and .cdx files listed. If
>WinZip is the one, then it may be worth visiting their site.

As far as I can tell, neither WinZip nor PKZip for Windows nor DynaZip will read lists of files to compress from a text file. In WinZip, you can enter something like *.prg, compress, then add the others, one name-with-wildcards at a time. In PKZip for Windows, you can enter these names into a list, clicking "add filter" after each one, and when the list is complete, compress them all at once. In DynaZip, file specifications with wildcards can be put in one of a few system variables that hold filenames or extensions to include or exclude. Your code could read your list file and put the names together, separated by spaces, into the DynaZip system variables, which I suppose would hold a maximum of 256 characters. If you had a really large specification in your list file, I suppose your code would have to compress in two goes.

Our company chose WinZip over PKZip for Windows for general office compression, possibly by default, or possibly because when we tried using our shareware PKZip for Windows for compressing one 8MB powerpoint file onto multiple diskettes, it wouldn't open the spanned zip file. I think that WinZip did that correctly. If it wasn't for that, PKZip for Windows looked more solid. I think that WinZip is much improved from 6.1 to 6.2. I think their 6.3 may still be in beta.

I persuaded them to buy me DynaZip for compression from within FoxPro. I have only seen one comparable product, and I can't remember what it is.