On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 01:55:03PM +0530, Dan Egli wrote:
But I know that bzip2 is not the best compressor anymore. It's not
too bad, but there are better ones. So I ask what you guys would recommend
as the compression system? The only restriction I have on it is that it
must be able to either handle the peculiarities of Unix vs. Dos/Windows
systems (i.e. ownerships, permissions, device files, and symlinks, like
tar) OR it must be able to compress from/decompress to stdin/stdout (like
bzip2).
xz usually can compress a little more than bzip2. The binary packages of
Arch linux (for example) are distributed in .tar.xz, and they migrated
to that a few years ago after .tar.gz files I think. Of course, xz also
is slower to compress than bzip2.
And a two
step process is unfortunately out of the question. The machines will only
have either 750GB or 1TB hdds, which obviously won't work for extracting
the tar to disk then extracting from the tar on disk. tar's extraction
process would run out of space before it finished.
A "two-step process" for extracting compressed tar files (be they
.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, or anything else) is entirely unnessary. tar
can decompress and extract the tarball simultaneously (check the man
page for the "-z", "-j", "-J" options; with modern versions of tar you
don't even have to specify these flags, a "tar xf data.tar.xz" will do
it all for you). And if you didn't want to do it that way, you could set
up the pipeline yourself with:
xz -d file.tar.xz -c | tar xf -
And if you want to get fancy and see the progress, use the "pv" (pipe
viewer) command:
pv file.tar.xz | xz -d -c | tar xf -
--
Rich
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