A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage. File archivers may employ lossless data compression in their archive formats to reduce the size of the archive.
gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU. Version 0.1 was first publicly released on 31 October 1992, and version 1.0 followed in February 1993.
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates.
zlib is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also a crucial component of many software platforms, including Linux, macOS, and iOS. It has also been used in gaming consoles such as the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Wii, Xbox One and Xbox 360.
In computing, Deflate is a lossless data compression file format that uses a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. It was designed by Phil Katz, for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool. Deflate was later specified in RFC 1951 (1996).
compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to gzip's fastest setting, compress is slightly slower at compression, slightly faster at decompression, and has a significantly lower compression ratio. 1.8 MiB of memory is used to compress the Hutter Prize data, slightly more than gzip's slowest setting.
rzip is a huge-scale data compression computer program designed around initial LZ77-style string matching on a 900 MB dictionary window, followed by bzip2-based Burrows–Wheeler transform and entropy coding (Huffman) on 900 kB output chunks.
lzop is a free software file compression tool which implements the LZO algorithm and is licensed under the GPL.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file archivers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. They are neither all-inclusive nor are some entries necessarily up to date. Unless otherwise specified in the footnotes section, comparisons are based on the stable versions—without add-ons, extensions or external programs.
Snappy is a fast data compression and decompression library written in C++ by Google based on ideas from LZ77 and open-sourced in 2011. It does not aim for maximum compression, or compatibility with any other compression library; instead, it aims for very high speeds and reasonable compression. Compression speed is 250 MB/s and decompression speed is 500 MB/s using a single core of a circa 2011 "Westmere" 2.26 GHz Core i7 processor running in 64-bit mode. The compression ratio is 20–100% lower than gzip.
HTTP compression is a capability that can be built into web servers and web clients to improve transfer speed and bandwidth utilization.
Pack200, specified in JSR 200, deprecated in JEP 336 and removed in JEP 367, is a compacting archive format developed by Sun, capable of reducing JAR file sizes by up to a factor of 9, with a factor of 3 to 4 seen in practice. Pack200 is optimized for compressing JAR archive files, specifically the Java bytecode portion of the JAR files. Applications of this technology include faster Java application deployment over Java Web Start.
Filzip is a freeware file archiver program for the Microsoft Windows platform.
Mark Adler is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
XZ Utils is a set of free software command-line lossless data compressors, including the programs lzma and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows. For compression/decompression the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is used. XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA-SDK that has been adapted to fit seamlessly into Unix environments and their usual structure and behavior.
mod_deflate is an optional module for the Apache HTTP Server, Apache v2.0 and later. It is based on Deflate lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding. This module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from Apache HTTP server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network. It also provides a filter for decompressing a gzip compressed response body.
mod_gzip is an external extension module for the Apache HTTP Server v1 and v2.
BetterZip is a trialware file archiver developed by Robert Rezabek, and first released in May 2006.It is developed solely for the macOS platform. Unlike the built-in Archive Utility from Apple it includes the ability to extract and compress in many archive formats, as well as the ability to view an archive and selectively extract files without automatically extracting the entire contents.
Loup is a French surname and given name, which means "wolf" and is derived from the Latin "lupus". Variants in French include Leloup and Leleu. In other languages, the equivalent of Loup is Lupo in Italian, Lobo or López in Spanish, Lobo or Lopes in Portuguese, and Lupu or Lupescu in Romanian. The name Loup may refer to:
Brotli is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Google. It uses a combination of the general-purpose LZ77 lossless compression algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd-order context modelling. Brotli is primarily used by web servers and content delivery networks to compress HTTP content, making internet websites load faster. A successor to gzip, it is supported by all major web browsers and has become increasingly popular, as it provides better compression than gzip.
