                              Compress::Zlib - 0.3

This is to announce the first alpha release of Compress::Zlib (formerly
known as Zip in the module list).

What is Compress::Zlib?
=======================

Compress::Zlib is a Perl external module which provides an interface to
the info-zip zlib compression library. zlib is a general purpose
compression library.

Some of the features provided by Compress::Zlib include:

   * in-memory compression and decompression
   * read and write gzip (.gz) files directly.

By way of an example here is a small script which reads gzipped files
and writes the unzipped output to standard output.


    use Compress::Zlib ;

    die "Usage: gzcat file...\n"
        unless @ARGV ;
    
    foreach $file (@ARGV) {
        $gz = gzopen($file, "rb") 
             or die "Cannot open $file: $gzerrno\n" ;
    
        print $buffer while $gz->gzread($buffer) > 0 ;
    
        die "Error reading from $file: $gzerrno\n" if $gzerrno ;
        
        $gz->gzclose() ;
    }
    

Availability
============

Compress::ZLib is available from

    ftp://ftp.???/Compress-Zlib-0.1.tar.gz

Paul Marquess
