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@ml110 ~]# tar zcf etc.tgz /etc/ > tar: Removing leading `/' from member names > [root@ml110 ~]# tar jcf etc.tar.bz2 /etc/ > tar: Removing leading `/' from member names > [root@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.
