erbo@mulberry.ucsb.edu (Eric J. Bowersox) (06/01/89)
In article <1793@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> rsmith@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Rusty Smith, MACC) writes: >Could someone shed a little light on the use of zoo vs. arc. I used >zoo on the new programs yesterday. Then for the fun of it I tried zoo >and pkarc to compress and extract the same files. Zoo was noticeable >slower and the file size difference was only a few percent smaller. >What is it's advantage ? For an upcoming issue of our club's newsletter, I did a test run on several "archiving" programs: PKPAK 3.61, PKZIP 0.92, Zoo 2.01, LHarc 1.12b, and, just for ha-ha's, an old copy of SEA ARC 4.30. I ran them on copies of four PD/shareware packages I had, plus some representative word-processor, spreadsheet, and ASCII text files. I also took a close look at each of the programs to see what features they had to offer. In terms of speed--well, PKPAK won hands down. It _alone_ was able to _con- sistently_ archive files as fast as they unarchived; no wonder SEA wanted to kill it! :-) (SEA ARC consistently placed last, often by factors of two or more over the next slowest program, LHarc.) Zoo was usually next fastest, but only because, to make PKZIP more comparable to the other programs, I used the '-ex' flag to make it automatically choose a compression method (closer to the way ARC/PKPAK would do it); in the one run I did with PKZIP without the -ex option, it placed very close behind PKPAK. PKZIP usually unarchived the fastest, and the two PK programs were usually neck-and-neck in unarchiving both to disk and to screen. For compression purposes, LHarc delivered the greatest percentage, but PKZIP was not far behind--in the spreadsheet test, it only lost by 1%. Zoo consistently scored fourth, behind PKPAK and in front of ARC, which was as much as 27 percentage points behind LHarc. These placings didn't vary much, no matter what I threw at the programs. In the features column: * About the only thing SEA ARC could do that no other program could was run programs from the archive file. (Zoo can do it with the assistance of the Looz program, and it unarchives to memory rather than disk, which is faster.) * Archive comments are supported in Zoo, PKZIP, and PKPAK, and Zoo and PKPAK also support individual file comments. (Zoo has the best comment facility, allowing nearly unlimited-length comments.) * PKPAK is the only program that can encrypt files as they're archived. (PKZIP will supposedly add file comment and encryption options in the future.) * PKZIP and Zoo can fix broken archives with the assistance of bundled utility programs (PKZIPFIX and Fiz, respectively). * The PK programs support response files, while Zoo can read filenames to be archived from standard input (and the supplied Stuff utility is very good for supplying input for that purpose). * The PK programs can make self-extracting archive files, as can Zoo with the optional Sez utility, but LHarc's self-extracting facility is by far the most complete, with the ability to specify text that is displayed when the archive is extracted and a batch file to start upon completion of the extract process (AUTOLARC.BAT). * PKZIP, Zoo, and LHarc all support subdirectories, which may be important to you. * As far as I know, only SEA ARC and Zoo files can be ported to systems besides MS-DOS; PKZIP files may be at sometime in the future. * Finally, Zoo and LHarc are both public-domain; the others are all shareware. My recommendation? Well, I normally use PKZIP to store things I generate, but I keep all of them on hand, because not everybody thinks like I do :-). (Actually, PKPAK is good for keeping secrets, with its encrypt option, and it's the type more people have.) Zoo is good because the source is readily available and a version of it will work on your UN*X machine; handy to have around for that instance, and it'll compress better than the other option, SEA ARC, which means less transfer time lugging it around. (I suspect this is why Rahul switched to Zoo files for his postings...besides the fact that it's PD and he wrote it ;-) ) If I were setting up a big system so that novices could get it up and running, though, I'd use LHarc and make a self- extracting archive; the AUTOLARC.BAT file could be of some use there, for instance, in installation. For information purposes--all timings and size comparisons were done on my own system, an 8 MHz 8088 with 20Mb hard disk; Norton SI gives it a CI of 1.7 and a DI of 1.4. To time the programs, I used a program of my own devising, written in C, that executes a program and, once it terminates, reports the time it took in seconds. Well, that's my say in the matter. If any of you know of any factual incon- sistencies in the above (particularly the features descriptions), please e-mail or post, as I'll want to get the kinks worked out before I actually write the article. Hope this helps! :-) ///////// Disclaimer: Uh, well, Huttenback didn't need one... \\\\\\\\ ////// * Eric J. Bowersox (ERBO) * VP, UCSB Campus Computer Club \\\\\\ //// erbo%cornu@hub.ucsb.edu ...!{ucbvax,ucsd}!ucsbcsl!hub!cornu!erbo \\\\ // ----- Vertical is horizontal turned 90 degrees. -- M. Gegus ----- \\
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) (06/02/89)
In article <1897@hub.ucsb.edu>, erbo@mulberry.ucsb.edu (Eric J. Bowersox) writes: [A very good and thorough account of the different archivers] >* PKZIP and Zoo can fix broken archives with the assistance of bundled > utility programs (PKZIPFIX and Fiz, respectively). LHARC also has a fix-broken-archives utility, called LHX. I believe that it was recently posted to the net. -- Marc Unangst UUCP smart : mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us UUCP dumb : ...!uunet!sharkey!mudos!mju UUCP dumb alt.: ...!{ames,rutgers}!mailrus!clip!mudos!mju Internet : mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us