Re: tar vs

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

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On 03/17/07 12:33, Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
>>
>> - tar has been around forever
>> - tar is standard on pretty much every *nix system (which GNU tar
>>    becoming more common even on commercial Unices)
> 
> Tar is easily available even on Windows. Good programs like 7-zip and many,
> many others, can handle tar well.
> 
> - gzip provides better compression than zip (bzip2 is even better but
>>    it takes lots of CPU)
> 
> rzip, which is built on top of bzip2, manages to compress significantly
> better than bzip2 (specially for large files), while being significantly
> faster.
> A drawback is that it cannot work as a filter (IIRC, it can't read from a
> pipe, and the author says that the design of the algorithm makes it hard or
> even impossible to make it able to read from a pipe).
> It was done by Andrew Tridgell (which dispenses presentation).
> 7zip compresses even more (more than zip, gzip, bzip2 or even rzip) but is
> very slow.

I'll have to try it.

> My choice is rzip.

For big "stand-alone" files, it's great.

> I really don't know why isn't rzip integrated with tar (like gzip and bzip2
> are) and why isn't it more widely used.

Because tar uses pipes, which, as you pointed out, rzip can't use.

> 
> 

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