Geek Style
There is many compression software and algorithms available today. Many people are still using zip (the oldie but goodie) while many others are cult of RAR. In UNIX, the gzip is the classic and widely used compression program, but bzip2 seems to have many fans either. Mac users are still using StuffIt since I guess they have no more choice! (Correct me if I am wrong please)
You are also using your favorite compression program with your very own custom settings perhaps, which fit the best for your needs.
Everything that we know about our favorite compression program is that it “feels” faster or “probably” makes smaller archives. But have you ever tested different programs yourself to compare them? I did.
How?
The test bench is my personal computer at home, running FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT on Intel 1.7 GHz CPU with 512K L2 Cache and 512MB DDR memory. My OS is completely rebuilt using gcc with
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6 Responses to Compression utilities comparison
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This is a good post. Personally, I think BZ2 should be recognized for its small filesize and so-so compression time. Yeah, 5 minutes compared to 2 is big, but so is 20MB of extra to download.
I’m also interested in the 7-zip format. Interestingly, they offer downloads in .zip for windows and .bz2 for linux. Here’s the link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/
It would be cool to plot the results on a graph, file size versus compression/decompression time. Also give lzop a try: it is very fast although only lightly compressing (probably still better than arc).
Go to
http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=4&pgno=0
THAT’s a review!
MAC users have several choices (with OS X –unix–)
Stuffit is an addon tool.
zip, gzip, compress are all built in.
bzip can be buit on OS X.
Actually bzip2 is ALSO built into os x and of course you can download rar. Basically OS X was based off of FreeBSD so anything that runs on freebsd should run with little or no modification on x.