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Compression programs on Linux

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http://linuxaria.com – Or zip VS gzip VS bzip2 VS xz In a previous article about the tar program I mentioned gzip and bzip2 compression methods as options to create a tarball (and I forgot xz). To make amends today I will introduce the main methods to compress the file and I’ll do some tests to see how they behave. I will consider zip, gzip, bzip2 and xv, i will not test compress another compression program present on Linux systems but now dated and surpassed by the other programs. (Software)

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Submitted by linuxaria on 09/10/2011

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In the "Why Xar" page of the Xar google code page it says:

"Additionally, this means xar can use different compression methods for each file in the archive.

I'd like to create simple bash script that, given a directory, compresses each directory by name, e.g.:

Contents of ~/Documents Folder1 Folder2 Folder3

compress-subdirectoies.sh ~/Documents

Results: Folder1.[some kind of compression like bzip2 or zip] Folder2.[some kind of compression like bzip2 or zip] Folder2.[some kind of compression like bzip2 or zip]

Any advice would be appreciated

From my tests so far on OSX 10.8 and CentOS 5.5, it looks like tar automatically deduces the compression type of an archive, i.e., I could do tar -xf <compressed archive> instead of doing tar -jxf <bzip2 compressed archive> or tar -zxf <gzip compressed archive>.

I would like to know if I can depend on this automatic compression detection feature of tar, or is this feature new?

Im using Apache and I have enabled zip compression to all my virtual host domain. However, I want to disable the gzip compression on one particular virtual host only. I try this method.

All separated virtual host file i.e.

I have IIS 7.5 set to compress all static files (the default), yet it does not compress .js (javascript) files.

I have access to a server via SSH, I download files from it over SFTP or HTTP. I want to pull down a 4.4GB .mkv file but I have limited bandwidth.

I have used zip, gzip and p7zip, but the file is always 4.4GBs after the compression process. After fiddling with some of the CLI args I managed on one attempt to get the file down to 4.3GBs.

In this article, it is intended to discuss the following utilities that are used to compress and uncompress files in Linux:

tar gzip & gunzip bzip2 & bunzip2

tar

I have a rather large file (~50GB) and it takes some time to run

tar xvf file.tar.bz2

on it. I'm aware of programs that can do parallel compression for bzip2 files but unaware of programs that can do parallel decompression for bzip2 files.

Are there any programs that can achieve this? What is the exact syntax of the command to use to extract from the file?

I'm using ubuntu 12.04

Idiot-proofing bzip2 creation 3 years 19 weeks ago

Specifically w/regard to naming your own bzip2 files.