Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!munnari!mulga!ditmela!latcs1!vertical!greg
From: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Standard for file transmission
Message-ID: <94@vertical.oz>
Date: 5 May 88 01:27:32 GMT
References: <292@cullsj.UUCP> <55@psuhcx.psu.edu> <537@csccat.UUCP> <296@cullsj.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Organization: Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 29
Keywords: protocol compression source
Summary: But compress DOES compress binaries...

In article <296@cullsj.UUCP> jeff@cullsj.UUCP (Jeffrey C. Fried) writes:
>  1) COMPRESS is a text only compression routine.  It will not now, or ever,
>     help in the compression of binary files.

No doubt others will point this out, but:
using compress V4.0, nethack 2.3 binary on a sun:

	Script started on Thu May  5 11:20:17 1988
	vertical% ls -l nethack
	-rwxr-xr-x  1 greg       761856 May  5 11:20 nethack*
	vertical% compress -v nethack
	nethack: Compression: 48.25% -- replaced with nethack.Z
	vertical% ls -l nethack.Z
	-rwxr-xr-x  1 greg       395121 May  5 11:20 nethack.Z*
	vertical% exit
	vertical% 
	script done on Thu May  5 11:21:37 1988

I would call that working. (Compress works on arbitary streams of 8-bit
bytes. It would be possible to write a version that only compressed 7-bit
text, and perhaps got better compression (say, 5%), but that is NOT the
version in the public domain).

Greg.
-- 
Gregory Bond,  Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia
Internet: greg@vertical.oz.au	(or greg%vertical.oz.au@uunet.uu.net)
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