Hi, On 22 May 2010 01:44, Caleb Clausen <vikkous / gmail.com> wrote: > I'm not a big fan of .zip either, but give it its due. > > Zip has the advantage that you can 'seek' to arbitrary files within > the archive without needing to decompress all the other files that > come before it. That's not true of gzipped tar files..... > > Because each member of a zip file is a compressed separately. But this > same design decision is why .tar.gz compresses better than .zip, given > the same collection of files. > What about LZMA (p7zip, xz) ? From my experience it's far better in size than .zip and .tar.{gz,bz2}, and it has the ability to get one file at a time. The downside, is, I suppose, the speed/computation for compressing/extracting. Let's see a little on Ruby's source (I could not get xz working on OSX): (format, size, compression time, extraction time, relative size to original, Mo compressed/s, Mo extracted/s) fmt size ctime xtime psize Mc/s Mx/s 7za 5476 14.7s 7.8s 13.01% 2.86 5.39 bz2 6792 8.7s 3.6s 16.14% 4.84 11.69 gz 8252 3.0s 4.0s 19.61% 14.03 10.52 I personally prefer a little slower compression/extraction with a low size, as it make easier downloads. Regards, B.D.