Re: bzip2 is absolutly Amazing!
Benjamin Pharr wrote:
> I agree with you for the most part, but you should be aware this works the
> other way in certain situations. I recently compressed a text file full of
> numbers with both bzip2 and gzip, and the bzip2 file was ~350MB and the
> gzip file was ~120MB. I surprised me, too, but in some cases gzip works
> much better.
>
> Ben Pharr
>
> At 09:43 PM 12/6/01 +0100, you wrote:
> >Hi there!
> >
> >I have just found out that bzip2 is _really_ _great_ for large files.
> >I have tar'ed a whole debian-installation (1.2 gigs).
> >This tar, compressed with gzip, has a size of ~390MB.
> >The same tar, compressed with bzip2 has a size of 110MB!!!
> >
> >So for every body out there: If you have a large file to compress
> >(and enogh time resp. CPU-power) then check out bzip2.
> >It is much slower than gzip, but (at leas for sufficient large files)
> >much better.
> >
> >So long
> >
> >Andreas Maresch
>
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The next step in file compression technology might be a combined bzip2-gzip
program that does it both ways compares the sizes and chooses as output, the
smaller result.
Also, there is a ultimate limit on how small the result can be, if the
compression is lossless. The size of the best compression result is likely a
reasonable measure of the Shannon information content of the original file. Why
would you be interested in that? Well, maybe it has something to do with the
ultimate meaning of software.
Paul Condon
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