On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Aseem wrote:
i found that gzip compresses more for text files while bzip2 was good for binary file compression. i found both gzip and bzip2 better than winzip when it comes to maximum amount of compression.
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.
philip