file reports 'packed data'

[John Chambers]

| I've got a number of apparently compressed files from an older AIX
| machine, with '.z' extentions (not .Z), that file reports as 'packed data,
| xxxxxxxxx characters originally'.  I don't know how they were generated
| (the guy that did that is no longer working here, and appears to be
| unreachable).  Neither gzip nor ncompress can do anything with these.
|
| Does anyone have any idea how to uncompress them on a Linux system?

Yeah; those come from the old "pack" command, which has  pretty  much
been dropped because we have such better compression programs now.  A
quick look around a number of systems (linux and BSD)  where  I  have
accounts shows that they all have an "unpack" command, though none of
them has "pack".  However, a quick check of unpack's behavior implies
that it probably isn't the old command of that name.

I wonder if pack/unpack are lying around in some online archive?