a problem about compress and gzip

[lin.chen]

I want to know which tool have higher compress rate?which is not HP's product?
1.gzip
2.compress
3.bzip2

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

You can get any of the compress utilities for HP, they are GNU. Compress is the oldest and has poor compression rate, after compress gzip, and the best compression is with bzip2.

So, this is the scale:

BEST - bzip2
VERY GOOD - gzip
POOR - compress

[Steven Schweda]

The best way to see what each program does
with your data is to test each one on your
data. In my experience, bzip2 > gzip >
compress.

"compress" typically comes with the OS. The
other two may or may not, but they're
normally very easy to get and build.

http://www.bzip.org/

http://www.gzip.org/

[Peter Godron]

Hi,
compress and gzip are based on Lempel-Ziv, whereas bzip2 on Burrows-Wheeler.
Of the two methods Burrows-Wheeler IN GENERAL is considered the more efficient. But a lot also depends on your data and time to compress/uncompress.

[Peter Godron]

Hi,
could you please complete this thread and share your findings. This will help resolution of similar questions in the future.