
                     Perl-Bzip2 -- Bzip2 bindings for Perl5

              Copyright (c) 1999 Gawdi Azem
              azemgi@rupert.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

What is Bzip2 ?
=============
Bzip2 is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C.
It offers pretty fast compression and fast decompression.
Bzip2 has very good results, if you want to compress ASCII Documents.

What is Perl ?
==============
Perl is an interpreted programming language optimized for scanning
text and useful for many system management tasks. To find out more,
point your browser to http://www.perl.org/ .


What is Perl-Bzip2 ?
==================
Perl-Bzip2 provides Bzip2 bindings for Perl5. I.e. you can access the
Bzip2 library from your Perl scripts there by compressing ordinary
Perl strings.


Any caveats ?
=============
As I'm no Perl guru I'm not sure if I got everything right - it
works fine for me, though.

Bug fixes and other feedback are welcome.

Author
======
Well, I just wanna tell you, that this was just a test of writing perl.
Therefore I hope, that the two functions I have exported to perl will work.

Copyright
=========
Bzip2: Julian Seward <jseward@acm.org>
Perl-Bzip2: Gawdi Azem <azemgi@rupert.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>

Perl-Bzip2 are distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License (GPL).  See the file COPYING.

Many Thanks to:
===============
Author of LZO:
Markus Franz Xaver Johannes Oberhumer <markus.oberhumer@jk.uni-linz.ac.at> 
for the great Perl-Module, that I have used to write my one.

Author of Bzip2:
Julian Seward <jseward@acm.org>
for writing this great algorithm for the rest of the world.

Friend, Perl-Guru:
Christian Harms, chrisian@harms.net
I am just a beginner in writing perl. I have started this year with writing
perl scripts.


Addendum by Marco "Kiko" Carnut <kiko@tempest.com.br>
-----------------------------------------------------

When I tried to install this module, compilation failed because it
used the old style bzip2 API function names; libbz2 1.0 and later
add a BZ2_ prefix on function calls. I fixed that and worked fine.

BTW, if you want to save your buffer so that the bzip2 command line
utility can read it, remove the trailing bytes before the "BZ" bytes
in the compressed stream. And, if you're on Windows, make sure to
use binmode on your output filehandle.

