Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!iuvax!bobmon From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: A Dumb Idea Message-ID: <11633@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 14 Aug 88 16:43:41 GMT References: <17362@gatech.edu> <581@rtg.cme-durer.ARPA> Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante) Organization: malkaryotic Lines: 18 Since "this machine's" ULTRIX allocates disk blocks 1K at a time, I average about 500 bytes of internal frag. loss per file, regardless of compression. If I compress a file less than 1K, there is no change (compress knows it made a smaller file, but doesn't know that the same block is allocated). With many smallish files this can be a problem; the recent Omega game posting is an example. So here's my sick solution: I compressed all the files. Then I used the UNIX-based ARC to jam them all into an archive. ARC didn't do any compression, since compress had already done a superior job, but it did flush all that internal fragmentation. Plus supplying file-by-file CRCs, allowing individual extraction or updating, maintaining an original-date directory.... BTW running ARC on the original files produce a noticeably larger archive; compress really did do a much better job, even after ARC collected everything together and added its own internal info. -- -- bob,mon (bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) -- "Aristotle was not Belgian..." - Wanda