Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!willett!dwp
From: dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Automatic Disk Compressors?
Message-ID: <1094.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jun 90 03:34:18 GMT
References: <268@demott.COM>
Organization: Latest link in the ForthNet chain.  (Pgh, PA)
Lines: 37

In <268@demott.COM>, kdq@demott.COM (Kevin D. Quitt) writes:

>     Based on your description, I can't tell why Squish Plus is better
> than, say, PKZIP, or ZOO, or any of the other PD/Shareware compressors.
> Care to go into that a little more?  Or would you like a copy of the
> latest PKZIP to test?

Fair enough.  The reason I chose Squish Plus was that it *never* uses
more disk space than the file consumes while compressed.  When you read
and write the file it is automatically de-/compressed.  I chose this
particular feature because it means you don't need to have the disk space
available for the uncompressed version.  For example, if you have a 100K
text file compressed into a .ZIP file and you want to read it, you must
un/de zip it.  This means that in addition to the 55K (say) that the
.ZIP consumes you need to have 100K free for the un/de zipping process.
I like Squish Plus because you never need that buffer space, blocks are
compressed and decompressed in memory, on the fly, between the disk and
DOS.  I also like it because I don't have to run pkunzip manually before
I want to look at the files, and then delete them or re-zip them when
I'm done.  There is some other compression product that does do that
step for you automatically; but it still happens; it still takes up
extra room *on the disk*.  Squish Plus does use memory for this process,
however, and it helps to have extended or expanded memory to use for
"buffering" space.

Is this any clearer?

-Doug

P.S.  Squish Plus requires you to set aside space on the disk for its
uses (a Squish Disk file).  However, since I keep news articles in my
Squish Disk, it is always full or nearly full, so much so that I would
not have the free disk space for the uncompressed versions of newsgroups.

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