emulate an end-of-media

[Mike Meyer]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:28:53 +0100 Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg at britannica.bec.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 07:44:48PM +0100, Martin Laabs wrote:
> > I also made a comparison between gzip and bzip2 regarding
> > the compression ratio on a dump of my home directory (3.2GB)
> > bzip2 took about 74min to compress, gzip only 11minutes. And
> > in terms of compression ratio bzip2 was only 3% better than
> > gzip.
> That's not a realistic test case. bzip2 normally takes trice the time
> and compresses 10% better. I can't comment on compress.

Considering we're talking about compression methods to use on dump
output, that would seem to be the definition of a "realistic test
case". Telling us what it "normally" does without defining what input
is considered "normal" doesn't help much.

In any case, this is a good argument for using -P, and letting the end
user choose the compression tool they want. gzip if they want speed,
bzip2 if they want better compression, compress if they want
portability back to 4BSD, or next years superduperzipper.

     <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.