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linuxmemes @lemmy.world

cm0002 @lemmy.world

1w ago

This town ain't big enough for the 2 of us

32 comments

zip is better than tar.gz for some applications though.
notably, individual files can be read from a zip archive without unpacking the whole archive, different than tar.gz files.
tar.gz files are only better if you pack and unpack the whole archive at once, but even then, they don't have much advantage. the major advantage is that you can pipe the output of tar creation over the network to another computer who decompresses the tar immediately, thus transferring a folder. zip has index at beginning/start, so it requires seek when writing or skip when reading, so it can't be streamed.
- One thing that I find useful is that you can do --filesync with an existing zip, which means it only updates the files if the date/size don't match. This saves a bunch of time on large archives that don't need to be created from scratch every time.
- Where does 7z fit into all of this?
  
  I think that also works like a zip
- But afaik with many files in an archive a tar.gz manages higher compression ratios since each file isn't compressed individually. It probably isn't relevant unless archiving a large amount of data though.
  Does .zip have other advantages though? I don't often need just one file from an archive anyway.

honestly most of the time if I'm sending an archive, my main goal is to bundle the files, not ideal compression. zip is the most compatible format

Sends tar.gz in return
- Oddly, Windows can natively handle .tar.gz now. Found that out the other day.
  
  Probably part of that Windows Subsystem for Linux
  
  It also came with tar preinstalled in cmd for a while before supporting it in their GUI.
  
  Yeah, but it's a two step process. You first unpack the gz, than unpack the tar
- It can always be a weird self-extracting shell script.
  
  I never trusted those

Just as long as it isn't a .rar.

Mm zips :3
I've had quite a few, cause a lot of mods for games come in zip files x3
- see my comment above; it's way more efficient to read individual files out of a zip archive.

Not sure what the issue with zip files is? They're supported on basically every device and afaik are not a proprietary format or anything. Seems better to me than rar or 7z. Tar.gz is also fine, but * don't really see why one would care

Bc Linux is a .tar nation?
- Thanks, i didnt see that. Love it
- Yep

What am I missing? What's wrong with zip? Should tar.gz be used instead?
Anti Commercial-AI license
- Tar-nation.
  
  Goddammit, that's a good one 🤣
  Thanks!

Considering even Windows can open it without any third-party program, I would say it's quite useful.

A zip file? Thanks, that will fit in the trash bin quite nicely.

32 comments