the fear of missing out a better compression

Oblig. XKCD:

Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn't know it from the file sizes.

Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.

Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.

Obligatory shilling for unar, I love that little fucker so much

• Single command to handle uncompressing nearly all formats.
• No obscure flags to remember, just unar <yourfile>
• Makes sure output is always contained in a directory
• Correctly handles weird japanese zip files with SHIFT-JIS filename encoding, even when standard unzip doesn't

Where .7z at

.tar.xz

cool people use zst

(actually decreases decompression time by 1300%)

When I'm feeling cool and downloading a *.tar* file, I'll wget to stdout, and tar from stdin. Archive gets extracted on the fly.

I have (successfully!) written an .iso to CD this way, too (pipe wget to cdrecord). Fun stuff.

.tar.gz, or .tgz if I'm in a hurry

Where's .7z people?

Can someone explain why MacOS always seems to create _MACOSX folders in zips that we Linux/Windows users always delete anyway?

.fitgirlrepack

I use .tar.gz in personal backups because it's built in, and because its the command I could get custom subdirectory exclusion to work on.

.tar.7z gang (probably not a good idea)

I'm the weird one in the room. I've been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in "best" mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

Mf’ers act like they forgot about zstandatd

7z gang joined the chat.....

Me removing the plastic case of a 2.5' sata ssd to make it physically smaller

I mean xz/7z has kind of been the way for at least a decade now

Can we please just never use proprietary rar ever. We have 7z, tar.gz, and the classic zip

.tar.gz

all the cool kids use .cab

ZSTD FTW

I use the command line every day, but can't be bothered with all the compression options of tar and company.

zip -r thing.zip things/ and unzip thing.zip are temptingly more straightforward.

Need more compression? zip -r -9 thing.zip things/. Need a faster option? Use a smaller digit.

how about .tar.zip or .tar.rar?

That's fine. I'm use to being unrepresented in the arj, lha, and uc2 crew

If you download and extract the tarball as two separate steps instead of piping curl directly into tar xz (for gzip) / tar xj (for bz2) / tar xJ (for xz), are you even a Linux user?

.tar.xz

☠️

one of the cool things about tar is that it's hard link aware

tar cvjf compressed-shit.tar.bz2 /path/to/uncompressed/shit/

Only way to fly.

I'm a 7z person.

Good ol -xvjpf

.txz, I'm too lazy to type the full name

I'm from tar.gz.gpg gang to keep away nasty storage providers

This guy tar balls

.tar.zst forever

What's wrong with .7z?

Bzip2 compression is often surprisingly good with text files, especially log files. It seems to "see" redundancies there - and logs often have a lot of it - far better than gzip and sometimes even lzma.

Anyway, if I saw a bunch of tar.bz2 files, that's what I'd expect to find in them.

i just use either zip or tar+gzip. personally, i avoid rar as it's a proprietary format.

so silly loll

.zlib

most of the things i want to send around my network in archives are already compressed binary files, so i just tar everything.

I unironically used xz for a long time. It was just eazy and all around very good compress. A close second is 7zip because I used it on windows for years.

I’m in this picture and I resent it.

Make the stage 4 tarball

ZPAQ is for cool people with massive space savings

I still wonder what that's like. Somebody must still occasionally get a notification that SOMEWHERE somebody paid for their WinRAR license and is like "WOAH WE GOT ANOTHER ONE!"

Never looked back since 7z though. :D

Compatibility aside, I'd say that .tar.pxz aka .tpxz is probably my vote.

LZMA is probably what I'd want to use. xz and 7zip use that. It's a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it's faster to decompress than bzip2.

pixz permits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that's desirable.

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

It also can use .tar as its container format, which is desirable; that's everywhere.

The major drawback to .tar is that it doesn't support indexed access, so extracting a single file isn't fast, but .tar.pxz does.

Im a pirate, I am rar like, roawr, lol

What the fuck is that file extension?

?