hey this sounds interesting. i never bothered to know about file compression utilities. just used zip on Windows and tar, gzip on *nix . can you please give me some pointers towards basics of compression techniques.
regards aseem
On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Philip S Tellis wrote:
winzip (zip actually) is similar to compress. both compress and gzip use Lempel-Ziv encoding. Hence, both would provide similar amount of compression. gzip uses LZ77 as opposed to LZ for compress, so there is some difference.
The main difference occurs when compressing multiple files. gzip only compresses a single file, so you have to use tar to join all files first. This creates greater entropy in the final source file, so you get better compression. winzip on the other hand compresses each file and then concatenates them.
bzip2 uses block compression. i won't explain that here.