Speed ain't bad

[Paul Rubin]

Bulba! <bulba at bulba.com> writes:
> >With gzip, you can forget the entire rest of the stream; with bzip2,
> >there is a good chance that nothing more than one block (100-900k) is lost.
> 
> A "good chance" sometimes is unacceptable -- I have to have a
> guarantee that as long as the hardware isn't broken a user can 
> recover that old file.

Well, we're talking about an archive that's been damaged, whether by
software or hardware.  That damage isn't supposed to happen, but
sometimes it does anyway.  

> We've even thought about storing uncompressed directory trees, but
> holding them would consume too much diskspace.  Hence compression
> had to be used.

If these are typical files, compression gets you maybe 2:1 shrinkage,
much less on larger files (e.g. multimedia files) which tend to be
incompressible.  Disk space is cheap these days, buy more drives.

> (initially, that was just a shell script, but whitespaces and 
> strange chars that users love to enter into filenames break
> just too many shell tools)

I didn't look at your script, but why not just use info-zip?