in reply to Re^2: Perl - Socket and Data Compression
in thread Perl - Socket and Data Compression

My post was just "how to compress the bits". How to securely access the compresed bits is a different question which I didn't address.

From my experience the .7Z format is cool. But I've found my typical users can't install this thing even though its freeware. However, I've also found that I can use this thing to make a .zip file about 10x as fast and 20% smaller than the Windows .zip program. The Windows "unzip" can read this 7zipped, .zip file.

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Re^4: Perl - Socket and Data Compression
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Jul 18, 2009 at 15:15 UTC

    Woah... I missed the boat on that one...

    What about bzip2? tar -cvjf - /path/to/stuff | ...

    There's also rar, but I don't know much about it. I know there's a unix command unrar

    --Pileofrogs

      7zip will do better than tar.
      http://www.7-zip.org/

      7zip is free and works very, very well.

        Anything does better than tar. Tar does not do compression. Tar can call an external compression utility, though. -z calls gzip, -j calls bzip2 and you can call anything you like with --use-compress-program, though most people will just use a pipe at that point, E.G. tar -cvf - /path | fancy_zip > stuff.tar.fzip.

        The windows "zip" paradigm says that one utility should gather multiple files & directories into an archive and compress the archive too. The unixy tar paradigm says gathering multiple files & directories into an archive is a job for one program and compression is a job for a 2nd program. "Why have uncompressed archives?" you ask. A single byte corrupted in a compressed archive can ruin the whole archive, whereas in an uncompressed archive only one file will be lost.

        Anyway, you're happy with your solution, and that's what matters. Just wanted to ramble about tar and whatnot.

        Cheers

        --Pileofrogs