[NTLUG:Discuss] RAR

[Chris Cox]

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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