#1 2017-11-10 23:27:03

Martin

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 801

Website

Creating a compressed archive -- what to use?

Earlier tonight I was about to archive the content of a folder when it struck me that maybe there is a 'best' choice other than one of the usual suspects such as zip or tar.gz. A quick search showed me that there is no shortage of alternatives.

What is best considering:

* Resulting file size
* Portability
* ? what else should one consider?

/Martin

---

"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein

Sector11

Mod Squid Tpyo Knig

From: Upstairs

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 8,030

Re: Creating a compressed archive -- what to use?

Unarchiving.  I've had some fail.

---

Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 9,093

Website

Re: Creating a compressed archive -- what to use?

The best compression algorithm available in Debian seems to be https://packages.debian.org/stretch/lrzip

See https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/6/4/23

---

Para todos todo, para nosotros nada

ohnonot

...again

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 5,592

Re: Creating a compressed archive -- what to use?

for portability, i always use zip.
it doesn't compress so well compared to, erm, .7za iirc.
but in addition to being well supported on all platforms, users also instantly recognize it. everybody knows what "a zip file" is.

edit:
if portability is no issue, i still have 2 aspects to consider: speed and compression.
usually, the better the compression, the more cpu cycles it takes to de/compress.
most utilities default to something that tries to be a perfect compromise.

Last edited by ohnonot (2017-11-11 09:17:48)