How does gzip differ from winzip

He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler checksum function, and a co-author of the zlib compression library and gzip. When you see. Second, tar preserves all of the Unix directory information, whereas zip was not designed to do that.

Later extensions to the zip format with Unix-specific extra blocks tries to remedy this problem. You seem to be confusing formats with implementation. Show 26 more comments. Niels Keurentjes Niels Keurentjes Konrad Rudolph k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Tim Zimmermann Tim Zimmermann 5, 3 3 gold badges 26 26 silver badges 35 35 bronze badges. You are overstating the point. If people wanted random-access compressed archives, they could create ".

They don't, because most people aren't that interested in random access. There is a big community around the. You use this format every time you look at a webpage in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You need to go through all the entries from the beginning to get the one specific entry wanted, even worse: you need to go through all the entries until the end because the same file may be archived several times in several versions on several places in the same archive - and there is no means to figure it out except to read the whole archive entry by entry.

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See more linked questions. Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Stack Overflow works best with JavaScript enabled. Archives make it easier to group files and make downloading and copying these files faster. A self-extracting Zip file is an executable program file. EXE file that includes both a Zip file and software to unzip or "extract" the contents of the Zip file. Users can unzip the contents of a self-extracting Zip file by simply running it.

All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Cookies. Uninstall Instructions. Typical Uses for Archives: Many files available for downloading from the Internet are distributed as archives. Two benefits of using archives for electronic file distribution are that only one download operation is required to obtain all related files and download time is minimized because the files in an archive are compressed. It is often useful to send a group of related files to an associate. Rather than distributing individual files, it is often easier to distribute the files as an archive to benefit from the file grouping and compression.

Gzip is the newer of the two programs, initially released October 31, LZW was patented by Unisys. The two methods are incompatible, but for GNU, compatibility was always a secondary concern.

Since gzip offered better compression, it overtook compress as the de facto Unix compression standard. Since it is a Unix-like utility, it works two ways.

It can simply compress a file directly from the command line, like an MS-DOS compression utility would do. But it can also compress a stream passed to it via a pipe, the vertical bar character. This allows other Unix utilities to use it for compression, without having to implement compression themselves. Gzip uses a compression algorithm called Deflate, which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman encoding.

Deflate was invented by a programmer named Phil Katz. While Katz also patented Deflate, it was possible to implement Deflate in such a way as to not violate his patent.

It overtook numerous other compression standards, largely due to support from BBS sysops. Katz had implemented a version of an existing compression standard called ARC. SEA won the lawsuit but lost the PR war. Katz created a new compression standard that he called Zip. It created smaller files than ARC, which was an important consideration at a time when bits per second was a fast modem. ZIP is an archiving and compression tool, all in one, while Gzip needs the help of Tar command to archive files.

Gzip can save more disk space than ZIP compression applications. Linux SysAdmin and Web Technologist, passionate about building tools, automating processes, fixing server issues, troubleshooting, securing and optimizing high traffic websites.