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From: frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: PKLITE, what's the catch???
Keywords: PKLITE
Message-ID: <3307@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 27 Jun 91 08:42:43 GMT
References: <1991Jun26.012138.13729@mlb.semi.harris.com> <1991Jun26.141813.29418@midway.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason)
Organization: University of Iceland (RHI)
Lines: 31

>What I'd like to know is what the comparison (on the usual criteria) is
>between the various EXE compressors.  (Diet, PKlite, LHEXE)

The compressors I know of are PKLITE, LZEXE, DIET, ICE, TINYPROG and EXEPACK.
I believe there may also be one named AXE, but it is a commercial program, not
shareware or freeware like the others.

I was looking at the programs because my virus scanner has to be able to
recognize the packed programs, but not because I was interested in the
performance.

Nevertheless, I have some observations.

Don't bother with EXEPACK - low compression ratio, and it will only compress
EXE files.

LZEXE gets a high compression ratio, but it can only handle exe files directly,
although there is an utility included for converting COM files to EXE files,
so they can be compressed as well.

PKLITE seemed always to be able to handle files containing overlays without
problems - at least better than the other programs, so I would generally
recommend it.

ICE is also able to compress data files, and unpack them dynamically when you
read from them.

DIET has a serious problem when compressing files containing overlays, but
generally it had the highest compression ratio.

-frisk