Googling usenet archives, I seem to only come across articles of mine, so it could well have been my invention, though I strongly believe it's not. It is not a DOS thing, but possibly it was a French thing. The pixz variant also supports indexing a compressed tar archive which means it's able to extract a single file without having to uncompress the file from the start.Ĭompact is archive+compress (possibly with indexing, possibly members compressed separately), archiving doesn't imply compression. Like for gzip and bzip2, there's a parallel variant pixz that can leverage several processors to speed up the compression ( xz can also do it natively since version 5.2.0 with the -T option). On Linux, as a compressor, you've got xz that uses the same compression algorithm as 7zip (LZMA2). It's not able to store most of Unix file attributes like ownership, ACLs, extended attributes, hard links. It's available for Linux, but it can only create compressed archives in regular files, it's not able to compress a stream for instance. Ultra compression, dog slow: lrzip -z fileįor folders, just change lrzip for lrztarħzip is more a compactor (like PKZIP) than a compressor.

I'm sure you'll have great results compressing massive tarballs of source code :) sudo apt-get install lrzipĮxample (using default for others options): He wasn't even using the most aggressive second-pass algorithm! Lrzip works by first scanning for and removing any long-distance data redundancy with an rzip-based algorithm, then compressing the non-redundant data.Ĭon Kolivas provides a fantastic example in the Linux Kernel Mailing List wherein he compresses a 10.3GB tarball of forty Linux Kernel releases down to 163.9MB (1.6%), and does so faster than xz. The unique feature of lrzip is that it tries to make the most of the available ram in your system at all times for maximum benefit. Than bzip2) or speed (much faster than bzip2). The advantage can be chosen to be either size (much smaller The file and the more memory you have, the better the compressionĪdvantage this will provide, especially once the files are larger thanġ00MB. This is a compression program optimised for large files. Lrzip is what you're really looking for, especially if you're compressing source code!

Folder compressor software