Bulba! <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >With gzip, you can forget the entire rest of the stream; with bzip2, > >there is a good chance that nothing more than one block (100-900k) is lost. > > A "good chance" sometimes is unacceptable -- I have to have a > guarantee that as long as the hardware isn't broken a user can > recover that old file.
Well, we're talking about an archive that's been damaged, whether by software or hardware. That damage isn't supposed to happen, but sometimes it does anyway. > We've even thought about storing uncompressed directory trees, but > holding them would consume too much diskspace. Hence compression > had to be used. If these are typical files, compression gets you maybe 2:1 shrinkage, much less on larger files (e.g. multimedia files) which tend to be incompressible. Disk space is cheap these days, buy more drives. > (initially, that was just a shell script, but whitespaces and > strange chars that users love to enter into filenames break > just too many shell tools) I didn't look at your script, but why not just use info-zip? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list