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Date Posted: |
September 21st, 1999
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Last Updated: |
September 21st, 1999
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License: |
Freeware |
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Downloads: |
3,945 total; 40 recently |
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Page Views: |
4,062 total |
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User Rating: |
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8.57 / 10, with 14 votes |
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About bzip2:
Bzip2 is a freely available, patent free (see below), high-quality data
compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best
available techniques, whilst being around twice as fast at compression and
six times faster at decompression.
Why would I want to use it?
Because it compresses well. So it packs more stuff into your overfull disk
drives, distribution CDs, floppy disks, Zip disks, backup tapes, ... whatever.
And/or it reduces your phone bills, customer download times, long distance
network traffic, ... whatever. Pretty obvious really. Who's arguing? It's
not the world's fastest compressor, but it's still fast enough to be plenty
useful.
Because it's open-source (BSD-style license), and, as far as I know,
patent-free. (To the best of my knowledge. I can't afford to do a full patent
search, so I can't guarantee this. Caveat emptor). So you can use it for
whatever you like. Naturally, the source code is part of the distribution.
Because it supports (limited) recovery from media errors. If you are trying
to restore compressed data from a backup tape or disk, and that data contains
some errors, bzip2 may still be able to decompress those parts of the file
which are undamaged.
Because you already know how to use it. bzip2's command line flags are similar
to those of GNU Gzip, so if you know how to use gzip, you know how to use bzip2.
Because it's very portable. It should run on any 32 or 64-bit machine with an
ANSI C compiler. The distribution should compile unmodified on Unix and Win32
systems. Earlier versions have been ported with little difficulty to a large
number of weird and wonderful systems.
Because the documentation tells you how and to what extent I've tested it,
and you can decide for yourself whether or not to entrust your data to it.
For 0.9.5, the test volume is about 3 gigabytes in circa 74000 files.
The code is organised as a library, with a programming interface. The bzip2
program itself is a client of the library. You can use the library in your
own programs, to directly read and write .bz2 files, or even just to compress
data in memory using the bzip2 algorithms.
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Latest Version |
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Details about this version:
Version 0.9.5d has been released by the author recently but I haven't
had a chance to port it to the BeOS.
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Intel Version - requires R4.5 (460 KB) |
3,383 downloads |
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Intel Version - requires R3 (460 KB) |
300 downloads |
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Download |
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Primary download location [broken link] |
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PowerPC Version - requires R4.5 (460 KB) |
262 downloads |
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