this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Zip makes different tradeoffs. Its compression is basically the same as gz, but you wouldn't know it from the file sizes.
Tar archives everything together, then compresses. The advantage is that there are more patterns available across all the files, so it can be compressed a lot more.
Zip compresses individual files, then archives. The individual files aren't going to be compressed as much because they aren't handling patterns between files. The advantages are that an error early in the file won't propagate to all the other files after it, and you can read a file in the middle without decompressing everything before it.
Yeah that's a rather important point that's conveniently left out too often. I routinely extract individual files out of large archives. Pretty easy and quick with zip, painfully slow and inefficient with (most) tarballs.
A tar directory also preserves file permissions. And can preserve groups/ownership if needed.
Can you evaluate the directory tree of a tar without decompressing? Not sure if gzip/bzip2 preserve that.
Nowhere in here do you cover bzip, the subject of this meme. And tar does not compress.
It's just a different layer of compression. Better than gzip generally, but the tradeoffs are exactly the same.
Well, yes. But your original comment has inaccuracies due to those 2 points.