On Sun, 2004-01-25 at 11:34, Erin S. wrote: > would someone please explain: > aside from the difference in speed, what is the difference between gzip > and bzip2? > ~Erin
gzip is a stream compressor (operates on bytes in the order they come) while bzip2 is a block-sorting compressor. bzip2 has to be able to seek to the end of the file to optimize the order of the bytes before compressing, this is part of why it can be so much slower... also why it compresses smaller. And on really large files it can be painfully slow. _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
