rzip ------------------------------------------ Compression program to use long distance redundancies in files A compression program able to take advantage of long distance redundancies in files, allowing greater compression ratios. rzip uses a history buffer of up to 900MB, while gzip uses 32KB and bzip2 uses 900KB. rzip cannot read from the standard input or write to the standard output. A large buffer means it can find matching pieces of the input file over huge distances compared to other commonly used compression programs. The gzip program by comparison uses a history buffer of 32 kbyte and bzip2 uses a history buffer of 900 kbyte. The second advantage of rzip over bzip2 is that it is usually faster. The disadvantages are that you can't pipeline rzip (so it can't read from standard input or write to standard output), and that it uses lots of memory. A typical compression run on a large file might use a couple of hundred MB of ram. If you have ram to burn and want the best possible compression rate then rzip is probably for you, otherwise stick with bzip2 or gzip. See article "Which Zip Is Right For You?" by Jeremy Zawodny for comparison (rzip could compress 8:1) http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-06/diy_01.html In the following are the compression ratios of the large-corpus for rzip 2.0, gzip 1.3.5 and bzip2 1.0.2. In all cases the programs were run with their maximum compresion options: File Name rzip gzip bzip2 large-corpus/archive 6.03 3.64 4.97 large-corpus/emacs 5.08 3.66 4.62 large-corpus/linux 5.54 4.24 5.23 large-corpus/samba 9.55 3.50 4.78 large-corpus/spamfile 29.95 8.43 14.23 Runtime requirements: cygwin libbz2_1 Build requirements: cygwin libbz2-devel Canonical homepage: http://rzip.samba.org http://packages.debian.org/rzip Canonical download: http://rzip.samba.org/ftp/rzip http://packages.debian.org/rzip Version control repository: cvs -d :pserver:cvs@pserver.samba.org:/cvsroot co rzip Mailing list: Forum / Wiki: IRC channel: Upstream contact: Author: Andrew Tridgell Bugs: License: GPL Language: C ------------------------------------ Build instructions: unpack rzip-2.1-1-src.tar.bz2 if you use setup to install this src package, it will be unpacked under /usr/src automatically cd /usr/src ./rzip*.sh all This will create: rzip-2.1-1.tar.bz2 rzip-2.1-1-src.tar.bz2 ------------------------------------------- Files included in the binary distro: /usr/bin/rzip.exe /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/rzip-2.1.README /usr/share/doc/rzip-2.1/COPYING /usr/share/man/man1/rzip.1.gz ------------------ Port Notes: ----- version 2.1-1 ----- - Initial release 2007-12-20 Jari Aalto Cygwin port maintained by: Jari Aalto Copyright (C) 2007 Jari Aalto; Licenced under GPL v2 or later