smaller zip-like format?
pirx
pirx at mail.com
Sat Feb 8 18:07:55 EST 2003
On 08 Feb 2003 00:22:30 -0600, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 00:13, David Garamond wrote:
>> Does anyone know of an open format for compressed archive like zip, but
>> with greater compression ratio for lots of small (1K-4K) files, while
>> still maintaining relative ease for extracting member files from the
>> archive? I'm looking for something like Microsoft's CHM format. Python
>> binding is not a must, I'll probably write the binding if it doesn't
>> exist.
>
> A tar archive compressed with bzip2, perhaps? I haven't tested them,
> but .tar.gz seems to consistently come out better than zip, and bzip2 is
> consistently better than gzip. And there's Python bindings!
>
CAB (from MS) has that - you can test it is very effective in these
situations. So far as I understand that, the reason is that they compress
_all_ the files as one, unlike winzip etc. Thus the LZW algorithm used by
almost all searches for commonality strings in _all_files_. The price to
pay for this approach is that extraction of file no 10 requires reading of
files 1-9.
--
pirx
More information about the Python-list
mailing list