Re: [ILUG-BOM] zip

Sometime on Jan 16, Trevor Warren assembled some asciibets to say:

philip........did he say atr or zip....:-/

It doesn't matter. on linux, both zip and tar/gzip work. on windows, Winzip can handle zip as well as .tar.gz files.

besides, tar-gzip gives better compression than just zipping. No, it has nothing to do with the algorithms used, just the order.

zip does a compress first, concat second, tar | gzip does the tar - concat first, and compress second.

doing the concatenation first increases the entropy in the file, making it a better compressible.

compression is an entropy reducing process (and as such contributes to the longevity of the universe), and therefore, the more entropy present initially, the better the compression.

Philip