Destral

I have started a new open source project called Destral. It is a command-line utility to split and join files, much like Hacha and HJSplit.

The main advantages of Destral over Hacha and HJSplit are:

• Multiplatform
  It is written in pure C, therefore it should build in every operating system with a C compiler.
  This single utility works the same for Linux, Windows, Mac, etc, forget about using a different utility in each operating system. Same use, same flags, same everything.
• Destral is able to split and join using Hacha 3.0, Hacha 3.5 and HJSplit formats. To state it clearly: Destral does not use a new split and join algorithm. It does not need Hacha 3.0, Hacha 3.5 or HJSplit to work, I have implemented the algorithms.
• Destral is intelligent and uses sensible defaults.
  Most times you will not need to tell it what split and join algorithm you want to use, it will discover.
  For instance, when you want to join several chunks in a file you just run destral -j myfile.0, or destral -j myfile.000, or destral -j myfile.001 (at this moment you need to provide it with the path for the first chunk, but this weekend I will make it intelligent enough to search for the first chunk if you pass, for instance, chunk #3).

There is no release yet, if you are interested you will need to access the code via Subversion. The only dependency besides a C compiler is CMake, but it’s possible and easy to build it without CMake.

Current features:

• Join Hacha 3.0, Hacha 3.5 and HJSplit/lxsplit files (no CRC check in Hacha files yet)
• Multiplatform
• It works and is very fast

Known bugs: there is an issue I just discovered with the names of the joint file under certain conditions, I will fix this soon.

Future features:

• Fix bugs
• Implement splitting of files, with sensible defaults: Destral will automagically select certain chunk sizes depending on the input file (it will be possible to override that using parameters).
• GUI
• CRC reverse engineering (the Hacha developer does not answer my e-mails, so I have no information about the CRC algorithm he is using)