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From: james@jack.sns.com (James Hwang)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: Compressing more then one file in one compression-run ?
Message-ID: <1991May25.160851.11420@jack.sns.com>
Date: 25 May 91 16:08:51 GMT
References: <5655@mhres.mh.nl>
Organization: Systems'n'Software
Lines: 32

In article <5655@mhres.mh.nl> hst@mh_co2.mh.nl (Klaas Hemstra) writes:
=I have an idea for all of you archive-builders.
=It would be nice if the archivers would be able to compress multiple files
=in one compression-run. This way it would be possible to obtain much higher
=compression ratio's for certain sets of files.
=For example: If you have a lot of C sources in one directory and you want
=to compress it using PKZIP or ARC or ZOO, each file is compressed seperately.
=If you make a tar archive (with unix tar) and then compress it with unix
=compress, the compression ratio will be better.

Yes, I have same experience. The problem is almost every archiver
has no stdin/stdout.

For example:

If we have those options below, it would be really nice.

tar cv - |lharc a - filename

lharc x - filename |tar xv -

lharc x - filename |tar xv - single_file_to_be_extracted

Also the lharc handles the directories tree very poor but tar
has a nice way to do it.


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