COMPRESS FILES WITH WIN98 COMMAND-LINE UTILITIES

It's common knowledge how useful WinZip is--its name is synonymous with file compression and archiving. However, if you have the Windows 98 Resource Kit, you can quickly and easily compress a file to e-mail or reclaim some disk space. The command-line utilities Compress.exe and Expand.exe do exactly what their names suggest.

There aren't many command-line options for these utilities. Still, if you use the -r option when compressing a file, the compressed file's extension is automatically changed to a ??_ extension (e.g., document.do_).

The advantage of this approach is that if you then use WinZip to expand the file, WinZip automatically makes its best guess at the extension (dependent on the extension associations on the extracting PC) and extracts the file as such. If you use the command line to specify an extension for which WinZip cannot determine an association, you'll receive a prompt asking you to name the file before you extract it.