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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c,net.unix
Subject: Re: Wanted:Compaction Algorithm
Message-ID: <3261@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 20-Feb-86 14:59:35 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.3261
Posted: Thu Feb 20 14:59:35 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Feb-86 18:58:23 EST
References: <207@pierce.UUCP>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 20
Xref: linus net.lang.c:7391 net.unix:6603

> I am in need of a packing algorithm which works better than the
> PACK Utility of UNIX.  I have also looked at COMPRESS ( developed
> at University of Utah ).  COMPRESS works great if distinct number
> of input bytes is small.  But if the distinct input bytes reach
> 256 ( binary data ), PACK works better than COMPRESS.  With PACK
> I am getting a saving of 20-25%.  If anybody has an algorithm
> that would do better in packing "load modules", I would like to
> know about it.

Are you sure you have the latest version of "compress"?  I tried "pack"ing
and "compress"ing "/usr/bin/suntools" (which is a BMF executable image) and
"compress" did significantly better than "pack" did (it took significantly
more time doing it, but that's life).  Remember, Lempel-Ziv compression will
discover frequently-occurring sequences of bytes, and unless your machine
has all one-byte instructions you're likely to get some multi-byte sequences
occurring frequently.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.arpa	(yes, really)