On Feb 18, 7:22 pm, brab... / gmail.com wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2008 6:53 PM, Trans <transf... / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > So I has started to offer .zip packages of my projects to make life a
> > little easier for Windows folks --seeing as it's no sweat off the
> > backs of Linux folks either (unzip) --but then I noticed that zip
> > files are huge. I have a 1MB tar.gz that's over 3MB as a .zip. Can
> > that really be right?
>
> Yes, it sounds like it can really be right.  A zip archive compresses
> each file indivually and then adds them to the archive, this makes it
> easy to extract indivdual files later [1].  A tar.gz archive adds all
> the files to the tar and then gzips everything at once, this takes
> advantage of cross-file redundancy for a better overall compression
> ratio [2].

That's interesting. I created a utility a while back called rtar
(recursive tar). It drills-down to the bottom of each directory and
tars & compresses each directory and compressed each file, working
it's way back up to the top. You end up with a compressed archive
similar to your explanation of zip in accessibility, but still with
the overall compression of a single tar. I thought it was pretty cool,
but basically trivial to implement. So I emailed the GNU maintainers
of tar asking them if it might make a nice option to add to tar
itself. Of course, they never responded :(

T.