[okfn-help] Free/open file compression/archiving software?

Wed Apr 23 18:33:24 BST 2008

On 23/04/08 16:12, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> Alain Schremmer wrote:
>>> We'd ideally like to mirror the whole source, but 160mb seems quite 
>>> large (though from the download it looks like the file size is more 
>>> like 80mb).
>> I will look into this. The sitx file is 16.5 MB. I used Stuffit only 
>> because I didn't have the time to find a Free equivalent. Any advice 
>> here would be MOST appreciated!
> 
> I was wondering if anyone on list might be able to help advise Alain as 
> to what kinds of free/open software is available for file 
> compression/archiving? It would be interesting to hear about things 
> which are robust and cross-platform. (We're in the process of archiving 
> his textbook source on the opentextbook subversion repository.)

That's *really* easy:

   * tar + gzip
   * zip (i'm not entirely sure it is patent-unencumbered but there seem 
to be implementations on every F/OSS software platform I know of)

If you are looking for specific formats (e.g. audio/video) then it gets 
more complicated but you could start here:

<http://www.okfn.org/iai/wiki/FormatRegistry>

~rufus