ChunkJoiner 2.2

Last updated: April 23, 2001

Download URL:

chunkjoiner22.bin

Why is ChunkJoiner so cool?

Compatibility notes and known bugs (if any)

MacUser's rating: four out of five mice.

Featured in MacWorld Online's "The Compleat Internaut"

If you need a compatible splitter/joiner for Windows, MS-DOS, Java or Amiga try HJ-Split.

Featured in Dr. Koch's book Die besten Internet-Programme für den Macintosh.

Why is ChunkJoiner so cool?

ChunkJoiner lets you join (physically concatenate) a group of documents into a single piece. To use it, simply select the documents you want to join, and drag&drop the entire group on top of the ChunkJoiner icon.

The purpose of the software is to concatenate:

binary files previously split, maybe on a non-Macintosh computer
plain text documents (the options mostly apply to this case)
HTML documents; use these settings:

Insert Text
Header="<HTML>", Footer="</HTML>"
Skip Headers and Footers
Within each chunk, skip the data up to and including "<html>" and skip the data beyond and including "</html>" (Ignore Case both checked)
RTF files (this works only sometimes)

There are many options appropriate for plain text documents:

digest creation: build your own digests
setext creation: build your own setext-formatted structured text documents
skip headers and footers: allows to ignore extraneous headers and footers in the source documents; useful when some e-mail gateway splits your enclosure in multiple parts

Compatibility issues and known bugs

(The most recently added or updated items drift upward in the list)

Files larger than 2 GB

ChunkJoiner has not been updated to support files larger than 2 GB.

MPEG movies

Some people are attempting to split MPEG movies on Windows with HJ-Split, and join them back with ChunkJoiner on the Mac. This should definitely work. Unfortunately QuickTime still does not support multiplexed MPEGs properly, according to some reports at http://www.macintouch.com/qt5reader.html. So if the original does not play properly on the Mac, the one you obtained after splitting and rejoining still won't play properly.

Joining Order

In the documentation I wrote:

If the Finder view is set to by Icon or by Small Icon, the documents are joined in the selection order. That is, click on the first document, shift-click on the second, and so on, then drag&drop. To use the document name alphabetical order, view by Name, Select All, and drag&drop.

Ramsey French brought to my attention that this may not work. Technote 1121 says:

Finder 8.1 honors the order in which a group of icons are selected. The order can be important for subsequent commands to that group, like a Print or Open command.

Although this applies to selections made by shift-clicking or dragging, it does not apply to selections made in ordered lists with "Select All".

Here is what Peter William De Bonte had to say about my application:

I just wanted to compliment you on the speed of ChunkJoiner. I don't know how you do it, but I've tried six or seven file concatenators in the past twelve hours and the three others that actually worked required at least twice the time to join my 1.44MB gzip chunks. ChunkJoiner read in and wrote over 6MB in what seemed like 6 seconds! Smokes!

As a programmer myself (geez, I've spent so much time joining files now I probably should have just written my own... oh well :), I am darn impressed with your code! :)

Thanks, -Pete

P.S. - I'm only running this thing on a IIci reading and writing to a 90M Bernoulli Transportable (hardly modern technology :) and CJ still made quick work of it!

This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 9:45:37 PM by

Fabrizio Oddone, fab@kagi.com