On 9/14/05, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
bzip2 is quite well known on linux systems. I don't know how well Windoze supports that. It may be a question of $$$ to Windoze users to get a decompressor.
bzip2 is available for Windows. I think the question is $$$ for a graphical decompressor.
Ad 2.
Compressing more than one file at a time makes for a smaller archives because a compressor always starts with a low compression rate and builds itself up along the way. The first KBs of a file have the worst compression rate.
The max block size for bzip2 is 900kb, so sticking more than 900kb of files together is pointless. Moreso, the bzip2 manual says "Larger block sizes give rapidly diminishing marginal returns. Most of the compression comes from the first two or three hundred k of block size[...]", so even sticking more than 200kb or 300kb of files together may be pointless. I'd really think it more productive to measure the differences, rather than just assume that sticking even the small files together will make a significant difference.