Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:1998 comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d:50
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!egisin
From: egisin@watmath.waterloo.edu (Eric Gisin)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Standard for file transmission
Message-ID: <18621@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 3 May 88 20:50:22 GMT
References: <292@cullsj.UUCP> <696@fig.bbn.com>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 22

In article <696@fig.bbn.com>, rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
> If you are (sigh) going to post binaries on Usenet, DO NOT compress
> them first.  Many Usenet sites use compress to pack up their news
> batches.  Compressing a compressed file makes it larger.

But you are would not be compressing the compressed file,
you would be compressing an encoded file.

Here are the results of some experiments on a 100K UNIX binary:
$ uuencode | compress
-rw-r--r--  1 egisin           83111 May  3 16:25 uu.Z
$ compress | uuencode | compress
-rw-r--r--  1 egisin           81241 May  3 16:30 uuz.Z
Compressing before encoding results in a 2% shorter file,
but that is not really significant.

You can get better results by using a simple hex encoding:
$ compress | hexencode | compress
-rw-r--r--  1 egisin           78831 May  3 16:31 hdz.Z

None of this applies to source files,
they should never be compressed and encoded.