[Triumf-linux-managers] FYI - new file compression tools

[Andrew Daviel]

After years of using gzip everywhere (and lately bzip2, and back in 
prehistory, "compress", and occasionaly unrar), I find 3 new compression 
tools in 2 weeks. All better on text than bzip2.

(kgb I saw mentioned in a forum, while Wikilieaks hashes are distributed
in 7z. The 7z utility was compressed with xz (which was compressed with 
bzip2....))


>From some quick tests (AMD Phenom II 6400 bogomips)
size	ascii text		level	time
74109	robots-archive.txt		-
24820	robots-archive.txt.Z		0.008s
14140	robots-archive.txt.gz		0.010s
12517	robots-archive.txt.bz2 9	0.018s
11574	robots-archive.txt.kgb 1	0.222s
10630	robots-archive.txt.kgb 3	0.313s
9730	robots-archive.txt.kgb 9	3.379s
12104	robots-archive.txt.xz		0.065s
12639	robots-archive.txt.7z		0.042s

size		binary executable
10832200	mencoder	-
6654865		mencoder.Z     0.296s
4442113		mencoder.bz2   1.914s
4536467		mencoder.gz    0.630s
3619972		mencoder.xz    5.673s
3524578		mencoder.7za   2.466s
3593160		mencoder.kgb   42.598s

This is just an FYI. The utilities are not, AFAIK, installed on the 
compute cluster or included in SL5 repositories.
I only point out that they exist and can be built for Linux.
If there is any interest, I could probably make an RPM.




-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
Network Security Manager