On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 11:12:36PM +0000, Richard Farmbrough wrote:
The big advantage with pbzip2 (if it's the program I've been looking at) is the unzip speed. I can't keep everything unzipped, and some utilities can't read bz2 files. Every time I unzip pages-articles I am into a long wait - before I get an error...
Problem with pbzip is its "bad proliferation out there". It's not part of default installs and some distributions like the notorious Debian constantly ship old and buggy versions (1.1.8 in wheezy, 1.1.9 in jessie).
LZMA also offers a much improved unzip at the cost of a little more zipping time. Since many unzips occur and only one zip this seems like a good deal.
The world has moved on since my proposal in 2012 and maybe a look at https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4 would be in order.
regards,