.zip freeware?

zip/unzip are included, if you don't mind working in a shell. 'man zip' for details, but as an example, if I want to zip a directory with files in it, I might do something like 'zip -r zipfilename.zip directoryname' to zip up the directory and all its files.
 
true.

but...

using the stuffit freeware, i've noticed that:

nothing gets compressed.

in other words, i zip a 5 mb folder, and the zip is the same size. sometimes it's even larger. like 5.1mb.

i've always wondered, is this an issue because i'm using stuffit freeware, or what?
 
Depends on what's in the folder. If it's a bunch of .jpg's or .mp3's, it won't compress very much, if at all. Those files are already in a compressed form. The same is generally true of executables, but they'll often compress a little. The best compression is generally seen on files that have no compression and lots of repetative information in them. Large text files, for instance, compress quite nicely - sometimes as much as 50:1, although 10:1 is a bit more common.

As with so many things, though, the answer to the question of how well any given file(s) will compress is "it depends"... :)
 
... and the archive is a bit bigger (5.1M) because of the file hierarchy :)

Try to compress a Quark XPress doc, you'll see what 'compression' means. I've been downing a 33M file to 384K once. That's a big ratio, hm ?
 
you two are absolutely right, i just never thought about it that way...

yeah, i've only tried to compress mp3's and jpg's before...makes sense why i never saw much compression.

i just zipped up 1.5mb of text files, and got it down to 200kb. nice. good to actually understand what i'm doing for a change.

thnx for the info.
 
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