09 Dec 2004
Random Irritations No. 634
“Cryptically named compressed file archives.”

Downloads from the net, where not only does the name of the archived file you download bear no relation at all to the name on the download link but uncompressing the archive file produces something with yet another completely different name.

I find this is a great way to fill my downloads folder up with either multiple downloads of the same archive file as I hit 'Download' again after failing to find a file with the name I’m expecting, or multiple copies of the uncompressed archive as I doubleclick on that repeatedly for the same reason.

And today’s winner of the "stobsaí Teethgrinder of the Week" award - Epson for the download of the drivers for their 1260 Perfection scanner.

The 'Downloads' page tells me I’m downloading two files called 'Epson Twain' and 'Epson Scan'. However, what downloads are actually 'epson6517eu.sit' and 'epson19098eu.sit'. These in turn uncompress to a folder called 'perf1260p_macosx_5.7e_en' and a disc image called 'epson.dmg'.

The first is a ridiculously cryptic name which bears no relation to that of the .sit file which spawned it and the second is too vague and also a waste of time, since a disc image file .dmg is already compressed and stuff-ing it further saves negligible disc space and consequently having to un-stuff it again just adds another time consuming step into the download process.

Meta

TAGS: annoyancefilearchivesitstuffitdmg

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DATE: 09 Dec 2004

AUTHOR: stíobhart matulevicz

LAST MODIFIED: 25 Apr 2020  — REASON: "extract asciidoc preamble into separate file and include it"

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