Linux file compression tool guide
The compression and decompression of files is one the most useful inventions in the history of computing, but the lack of portable and open tools poses a major obstacle to making the process as useful as it could be. As long as we exchange files with other users of Unix-like operating systems, we can use portable tools like compress, gzip, and bzip2 (see Resources for links). But the rest of the world uses a lot of proprietary software -- and even proprietary compression algorithms -- that the owners may never release to the public.
Such a state of affairs could prove dangerous. Imagine a future in which we can't decipher a substantial portion of our archives because we created them using proprietary tools and algorithms, and the operating systems and hardware those tools ran on became obsolete and disappeared. That is why we should use open source compression tools, or at least commercial compression tools that use free and well-documented algorithms. (Just remember to turn any special enhancements off.)
This article is a guide to working with .arc, .arj, .lzh (.lha), .rar, .sit, .zip, and .zoo files on the Linux operating system. I chose to discuss those particular formats because users of the three most popular operating systems (MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS) use them most often. I wrote this guide to quickly point out the right tools, rather than to act as a detailed and technical discussion of file compression techniques.
Lastly, I'd like to include a short note about self-extracting files. Such archives are in reality programs that contain data in compressed form. When you execute them, they will unpack and copy the data stored within the body of the program to whatever drive you specify. The only problem is that they do not work under Linux and there are no tools to extract them. In such cases you will need to ask the person who created the archive to compress it as an ordinary archive.
That's it for now. I hope you will find this guide useful and that you will write to me with your comments and suggestions.
.arc
Files with the .arc extension are relatively rare. If you do stumble upon one of them, you can reasonably assume that it was created with the help of old MS-DOS SAE ARC or PKware PKARC archival utilities. This format is not well supported on Linux, and you can only hope to decompress those files on a Linux machine. If you need to create .arc files, try running original
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