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smaller zip-like format?

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Sat Feb 8 01:22:30 EST 2003 
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 00:13, David Garamond wrote:
> Does anyone know of an open format for compressed archive like zip, but 
> with greater compression ratio for lots of small (1K-4K) files, while 
> still maintaining relative ease for extracting member files from the 
> archive? I'm looking for something like Microsoft's CHM format. Python 
> binding is not a must, I'll probably write the binding if it doesn't exist.

A tar archive compressed with bzip2, perhaps?  I haven't tested them,
but .tar.gz seems to consistently come out better than zip, and bzip2 is
consistently better than gzip.  And there's Python bindings!

-- 
Ian Bicking  ianb at colorstudy.com  http://colorstudy.com
4869 N. Talman Ave., Chicago, IL 60625  /  773-275-7241
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of 
 killing innocent people" -- Howard Zinn
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