I have a bunch of very huge files located on a Linux machine that I would like to compress and save some space. I have tried using the tar/gzip combination and I have noticed that the compression ratio is not very good. A 1.2GB
file was compressed into a 1.1GB
file. I have tried increasing the compression level as suggested here: How to specify level of compression when using tar -zcvf?
but it still wasn't any better. I've copied the same file to a Windows machine and ran WinRar on it. The resulting compressed file was only 0.45GB
in size.
Is there a reason for such a huge discrepancy? Is there a better compressing tool for Linux?
UPDATE: I've even tried lzma and still not much better
There IS a rar utility for linux
, package name usually 'rar'.