Re: compressing VERY LARGE files

Don't give up on bzip2 or gzip just because they may not always be in the same place.

It may be simpler to write a routine to find the executable and run it than to get a module installed across all of those machines... If you can guarantee that at least gzip is on all the boxes, it shouldn't be too hard, in fact...

sub findCompressor {
    my @paths=(
         "/usr/bin".
         "/bin",
         "/usr/local/bin",
         "/usr/share/bin",
         "/opt/bin",
         "$ENV{HOME}/bin",
         "$ENV{HOME}/local/bin",
    );

    foreach my $prog('bzip2','gzip','compress') {
        foreach my $dir(@paths) {
            my $path="$dir/$prog";
            return $path if -x $path;
        }
    }

    # return some default non-compressing compressor??
}

# run once
my $compressor=findCompress();
[download]

Not sure if that makes sense in your case, but I think it would work...
--
Mike

Comment on Re: compressing VERY LARGE files Download Code

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Re: Re: compressing VERY LARGE files by gnu@perl (Pilgrim) on Sep 26, 2002 at 20:14 UTC
Thanks, I really had not thought of that. What I might do is write the location of the compression binary to a file once I find it, then check that file first each time to be sure it is still there, if not, just look for it again.	[reply]
Re^3: compressing VERY LARGE files by RMGir (Prior) on Sep 26, 2002 at 20:20 UTC
Glad you like it :) But I wouldn't save the location to a file. Imagine a very bare bones server, where only compress is installed. Your script runs once, saves /bin/compress as the preferred compressor, and never notices the next week when bzip is installed. (It could also have trouble if the executable was moved or deleted...) Compared with compressing a 600M file, I wouldn't worry about the overhead of doing (at most!) 21 -x's once each time your script starts up... -- Mike	[reply]
Re: Re: compressing VERY LARGE files by duelafn (Parson) on Sep 27, 2002 at 13:26 UTC
Many linux boxes also have the which command, so this could be simplified to, `my $prog; for (qw/bzip2 gzip compress/) { chomp($prog = qx\|which $_\|); last if $prog; } print "Found: $prog\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: compressing VERY LARGE files by RMGir (Prior) on Sep 27, 2002 at 13:52 UTC
As gnu@perl said in his original post, the compression binaries may not be in the user's path. which tells you where a program lies on your path, "which" may not help in this case... It could be added as an additional test, though. -- Mike	[reply]