Since Vista doesn't have compatibility for .RAR files, what should I use?
I tried WinRAR but it didn't really work.
izarc
Lol Vista
7zip does a lot of things, but the interface is pure hate.
ubuntu
PowerArchiver
I don't mind the 7-Zip interface personally. At least it doesn't try to replicate the look of Explorer. Plus it has its own awesome file format which is at least as good as RAR except even better because it's properly documented.
Agreed. 7zip ftw.
7-zip
As everyone says 7Zip,
/thread
WinRAR works fine on my Vista machine.
7-zip... it's:
(1) Free -- download it at no cost.
(2) Open -- source code and format specifications available.
(3) Decent -- 7z does pretty good compression, better than ZIP.
What more could you want? :-)
> (1) Free -- download it at no cost.
> (2) Open -- source code and format specifications available.
the same can be said about zip and bzip2.
> (3) Decent -- 7z does pretty good compression, better than ZIP.
uncompressed zip + bzip2 does better, and zip and bzip2 are far more common than 7z.
7zip's compression is generally cited as being better than bzip2.
Problem with bzip2 is you can only actually compress one file with it. If you're going to put a zip in it then you may as well put a tar in it.
Not only is 7zip's LZMA compression better than bzip2, but LZMA decompresses at a reasonable speed as well. bzip2 encodes a little faster, but is slow as fuck to decode.
I used to compress my old HTTP logs with bzip2. I knocked that off, because it took forever anytime I wanted to search them.
To make that more concrete, here's a compression test I did a while back on 101 MB of Apache logs.
$ ls -lS logs.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 13457837 Jun 1 15:01 logs.lzf (87.29%, 0.66s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 11338736 Jun 1 15:01 logs.lzo (89.29%, 1.06s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 6561300 Jun 1 15:00 logs.gz (93.80%, 5.03s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 4041193 Dec 15 10:51 logs.lzpx (96.18%, 13.00s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 4000415 Jun 1 15:00 logs.bz2 (96.22%, 116.00s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 3001727 Oct 20 00:43 logs.pmd (96.28%, 435.79s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 3938324 Jun 16 10:49 logs.lzma (97.17%, 14.15s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 1731711 Jun 1 18:32 logs.paq7 (98.36%, 11052.32s)Decompressing speed:
$ time paq7 logs.paq7 logs
193m27.43s real 185m3.48s user 0m1.68s system
$ time ppmd d logs.pmd
0m25.62s real 0m19.40s user 0m1.51s system
$ time lzpxj d logs.lzpx logs
0m27.04s real 0m14.17s user 0m0.66s system
$ time bunzip2 -c <logs.bz2 >/dev/null
0m11.33s real 0m11.10s user 0m0.03s system
$ time lunzmash -c <logs.lzma >/dev/null
0m1.98s real 0m1.73s user 0m0.05s system
$ time gunzip -c <logs.gz >/dev/null
0m0.85s real 0m0.76s user 0m0.02s system
$ time lzop -dc <logs.lzo >/dev/null
0m0.72s real 0m0.65s user 0m0.02s system
$ time unlzf <logs.lzf >/dev/null
0m0.59s real 0m0.29s user 0m0.03s systemSo I was wrong. LZMA compressed almost ten times as fast as bzip2. It took one-sixth as long (and only twice as long as gzip) to decompress. I used default settings for LZMASH (Unix bzip2-like program based on LZMA), bzip2, and gzip.
It surely depends on the type of data, but I'm still gonna say LZMA kicks bzip2's ass.
Uh, the question here was about decompression. And windows 7zip does that for a load of formats, and reasonably well.
>>13-16
bzip2 works better on zip files with no compression that it does on tar files. uncompressed zip + bzip2 is better than 7z.
>>18, that makes no sense. Uncompressed zip and tar are both just collections of files. If this is true, it could only be because you're talking about a zip/tar of lots of tiny files where the file info takes up a substantial percentage of the space.
For a directory with about 30 files in it (all scripts, in fact), I compressed three files. The tar is a tar, the format is never compressed. The zip and 7z were created with compression turned off. Results:
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 501760 2007-12-14 19:38 test.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 472411 2007-12-14 19:38 test.zip
-rw------- 1 me me 469089 2007-12-14 19:51 test.7z
Now I will bzip2 the tar and zip files, and then additionally create a zip and 7z file. For all commands I specified compression level 9 (best). Results:
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 267195 2007-12-14 19:38 test.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 267668 2007-12-14 19:38 test.zip.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 266118 2007-12-14 19:53 test.zip
-rw------- 1 me me 233809 2007-12-14 19:51 test.7z
Interesting things to note:
Incidentally I tried creating a solid archive as well (in this situation 7z groups the files together and then compresses the whole set in blocks) as I expected this to be smaller. But it turned out to be exactly the same size, so my input files mustn't be small enough to pay off for that optimisation.
>>21 Oh wow, the difference of 1,077 bytes between .zip and .tar.bz2 is HUGE :/
bzip2 is often worse or on par with deflate (gzip / zip) for very small files, and I guess that's what happened here.
All you guys have been talking about are plain text files.
Take binary files (even different kinds) into account and you can start your discussion from the beginning again.
Not really. The bottom line is that LZMA decompresses much faster than bzip2, compresses better, and is slightly slower than bzip2 to compress (or on par / faster in certain cases).
LZMA obsoletes bzip2, in my view.
Text or binary is irrelevant. What's relevant is entropy.
> > (1) Free -- download it at no cost.
> > (2) Open -- source code and format specifications available.
>
> the same can be said about zip and bzip2.
This is somewhat true. There are free implementations of the ZIP format, such as InfoZIP ( http://www.info-zip.org IIRC ), but I'm not sure what the patent situation is.
BZIP2 is a open-source royalty-free compression algorithm, so in that regard, yes, it has the same benefits as 7z.
> > (3) Decent -- 7z does pretty good compression, better than ZIP.
>
> uncompressed zip + bzip2 does better, and zip and bzip2 are far more common than 7z.
7z and ZIP are simply different ways of bundling files for compression by an algorithm such as BZIP2 or LZMA. As such, the container format shouldn't make a great deal of difference unless there's significant overheads. File ordering might play a part here too.
> my input files mustn't be small enough to pay off for that optimisation.
that's probably why the .zip and .tar.bz2 are smaller than the .zip.bz2 also.
>>26
zip normally uses the same deflate algorithm as gzip. it's not patented.
> BZIP2 is a open-source royalty-free compression algorithm, so in that regard, yes, it has the same benefits as 7z.
Yes and no. bzip2 can only do compression, 7z is a whole archive format, and not strictly a form of compression (the compression it uses is LZMA, I believe.)
>>23 fails to understand that 99% of what needs compressing is text in the first place. For graphics, video and audio we already have other ways to do it. Remaining files which are not graphics, video, audio nor text, are not the reason we are running out of disk space and thus do not need compressing.
On the other hand mail archives (text) get big. Log files (text) get big.