Re: The Saltine's Disks Archived at Mac GUI Vault

[dog_cow@macgui.com (D Finnigan)]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> D Finnigan wrote:
>> Steven Hirsch wrote:
>> 
>>>On 02/28/2011 06:23 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>WinZip certainly doesn't like it--"Error reading header after processing
>>>>0 entries."
>>>
>>>Hmm.  Fine on Linux with tar -xjvf ...
>>>
>> 
>> 
>> Steve Nickolas sent me mail yesterday stating the same thing. It looks
>> like
>> the problem was a too-old version of WinZip that didn't understand the
>> bzip2
>> compression algorithm.
> 
> So, what is the benefit of bzip2 relative to the ten other compression
> formats?
> 

According to the man page:

bzip2  compresses  files  using  the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text
compression algorithm, and Huffman coding.   Compression  is  generally
considerably   better   than   that   achieved   by  more  conventional
LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the performance of the  PPM
family of statistical compressors.


I'm just in the habit of using bzip2, because its compression factor in most
cases is "beyond belief" to put it simply.
(For Apple II disk images, maybe not so much.) I use it for every tape
archive that I want to have compressed.