Gzip better than Bz2 ? Normal?

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Mon Jan 2 10:16:23 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 21:06 -0600, Thomas Cameron wrote:

> 
> On my system, I used gzip and bzip2 to compress /etc just as a test:
> 
> [root at ml110 ~]# tar zcf etc.tgz /etc/
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
> [root at ml110 ~]# tar jcf etc.tar.bz2 /etc/
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
> [root at ml110 ~]# ls -lh etc.t*
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root 6.0M Jan  1 18:49 etc.tar.bz2
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root 8.4M Jan  1 18:48 etc.tgz
> 
> So on my systems, bzip2 beat the heck out of gzip.

Yeah - it really depends.
If I remember correctly - I was playing with bzip2 and gzip for man
pages on my lfs system, and for the man pages - gzip was both faster
decompression (when man wanted to read them) and smaller - in general,
but for info pages - bzip2 saved a LOT of space - I think the more data
you have (text files anyway), the better compression you get out of
bzip2.

I pretty much just use gzip though for everything - the extra space
isn't that much and gzip is pretty standard everywhere.




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