Which type of compression do you preffer?
Please compare with speed of making/extracting , compress ratio

Well, I'm strictly a Linux user, so it's mainly gzip or b2zip for me. b2zip has the smaller compression. As far as speed goes, I don't seem to notice significant spee differences. These two are just my favorite mainly because I can always count on their being supported on any GNU/Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris system.

For no reason, other than it is what I seem to run into most ofter I am primarly a 'gz' type myself. It seems to be avaialable in the places that I need it.

I mainly use Linux and other Unix like OSes so bzip and gzip are the compressions tools I use. I prefer bzip2 because it has a better compression ratio than gzip.

I heared z7 and some other compression tools , make better compression , but they are slow in creating than bz2 and gz types

Being a Linux user I almost always use gzip or bzip2. bzip2 has better compression but takes a bit longer to compress/uncompress. The Solaris machines at our work don't have bzip2 installed so in that case I need to use gzip.

Bzip2 and 7zip for linux and windows

As a Mac user, I missed the .sit (StuffIt) compression format (although I know it's proprietary, so as .rar).
But my preferences are .bz2 and .7z, and principally for this last one, which I think has a great future ahead if more developers/coders interest on it

As a Linux user, I prefer bz2. As a Linux user with a lot of Windows-using friends, i use zip. Many times people -without a clue of what Linux is- asked how i treat their "zipped" files without winzip...

I am a system manager of Linux and unix-like OSes, the bz2 and gzip always are the compression tool I prefer.
They have higher compression ratio,and almost built-in on various platform.

I just use plain old zip in windows and linux.

No need for fancy, high compression zip tools with the low price of hard drives today.

The only times I need to zip something is for emailing, uploading, or privacy.

Anyone can open a zip file.

bzip2 for me
gzip for others
zip for everything else

Normally gzip, but rzip and lzop in special cases.

$ time gzip sg.tar
real 0m0.574s
user 0m0.544s
sys 0m0.016s
$ time bzip2 sb.tar
real 0m8.148s
user 0m8.109s
sys 0m0.032s
$ time lzop sl.tar
real 0m0.084s
user 0m0.064s
sys 0m0.024s
$ time rzip sr.tar
real 0m3.307s
user 0m3.212s
sys 0m0.096s
$ ll s?.tar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 user ftp 1196002 Mar 1 13:31 sb.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 user ftp 1404466 Mar 1 13:31 sg.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user ftp 6635520 Mar 1 13:31 sl.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 user ftp 1954222 Mar 1 13:31 sl.tar.lzo
-rw-r--r-- 1 user ftp 1010341 Mar 1 13:33 sr.tar.rz

Windows / DOS - WinZip / PKzip 2.5
HP-UX - gzip
Linux - not sure yet. Still new to Linux, not UNIX.
Most likely gzip or zip.

Derek.
RH FC4

I like bz2. It has a large compression ratio.