[NTLUG:Discuss] RAR

[Michael H. Collins]

Split does that.

Chris Cox wrote:

> Another plus (I guess) for rar, is it does do multiple volumes for
> a single archive.  That's good if you have to break something large
> into pieces and reassemble... I believe you can run the utility
> on any piece and it will try to find the other pieces to
> decompress.
> 
> So maybe it does have a useful purpose.
> 
> I don't think there's a free version for Linux though... someone
> can prove me wrong of course.
> 
> Regards,
> Chris
> 
> cbbrowne at hex.net wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:15:39 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
>> nrut <baa204 at cronus.angelo.edu>  said:
>> 
>>> Chris Cox wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I think the only RAR (an ugly thing IMHO) utility is
>>>> shareware for Linux.  Do a search for rar and linux
>>>> on a search engine.
>>>> 
>>>> And let me know what on earth makes rar a good format.
>>> 
>>> Back in my few BBS days I discovered this file format and found that the
>>> rar utility often compressed files better (by a considerable percentage)
>>> than the standard zip format in use back then.  I have no idea how it
>>> compares to gzip or bzip2 now.
>> 
>> Part of what likely happens is that RAR may compress the whole archive,
>> not just the contents.
>> 
>> Consider:  You'll often find that a .tgz file is considerably smaller
>> than the corresponding .zip file.  Case in point:  OpenQueue, in tgz form,
>> is 152K in size, whilst the _same data_, in .zip form, consumes 183K.
>> 
>> The point of the exercise is that when you compress the _whole_ archive
>> at once, and not just the individual files in the archive, you can get
>> significantly better results.  For instance, TAR throws in a bunch of
>> header information...  That "bloats" the data, but it's _highly_ redundant,
>> compressing _real_ well.  In contrast, .zip files don't compress the header
>> info, and as they compress the component files independently, don't get
>> any benefit from inter-file-redundancy.
>> 
>> bzip2 provides compellingly better compression than just about anything
>> else, so long as you can afford the CPU time.  It's worthwhile for
>> Linux kernel transfers, as it saves quite a lot of network bandwidth, but
>> for anything that's not getting transferred a bunch of time, it may not
>> be worthwhile...
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-- 
Michael H. Collins              http://www.linuxlink.com
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