Tarfile .bz2

[Wolfgang Draxinger]

Jordan wrote:

> When using python to create a tar.bz2 archive, and then using
> winrar to open the archive, it can't tell what the compressed
> size of each
> individual file in the archive is.  Is this an issue with
> winrar or is there something that needs to be set when making
> the archive that isn't there by default.

When compressing a tar archive all files in the archive are
compressed as a whole, i.e. you can only specify a compression
ration for the whole archive and not just for a single file.

Technically a tar.bz2 is actually a aggregation of multiple files
into a single tar file, which is then compressed.

This is different to e.g. PKZip in which each file is compressed
individually and the compressed files are then merged into an
archive.

The first method has better compression ratio, since redundancies
among files are compressed, too, whereas the latter is better if
you need random access to the individual files.

Wolfgang Draxinger
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