bzip2.1

ncbi源码

During compression, \-s selects a block size of 200k, which limits
memory use to around the same figure, at the expense of your compression
ratio.  In short, if your machine is low on memory (8 megabytes or
less), use \-s for everything.  See MEMORY MANAGEMENT below.
.TP
.B \-q --quiet
Suppress non-essential warning messages.  Messages pertaining to
I/O errors and other critical events will not be suppressed.
.TP
.B \-v --verbose
Verbose mode -- show the compression ratio for each file processed.
Further \-v's increase the verbosity level, spewing out lots of
information which is primarily of interest for diagnostic purposes.
.TP
.B \-L --license -V --version
Display the software version, license terms and conditions.
.TP
.B \-1 (or \-\-fast) to \-9 (or \-\-best)
Set the block size to 100 k, 200 k ..  900 k when compressing.  Has no
effect when decompressing.  See MEMORY MANAGEMENT below.
The \-\-fast and \-\-best aliases are primarily for GNU gzip 
compatibility.  In particular, \-\-fast doesn't make things
significantly faster.  
And \-\-best merely selects the default behaviour.
.TP
.B \--
Treats all subsequent arguments as file names, even if they start
with a dash.  This is so you can handle files with names beginning
with a dash, for example: bzip2 \-- \-myfilename.
.TP
.B \--repetitive-fast --repetitive-best
These flags are redundant in versions 0.9.5 and above.  They provided
some coarse control over the behaviour of the sorting algorithm in
earlier versions, which was sometimes useful.  0.9.5 and above have an
improved algorithm which renders these flags irrelevant.

.SH MEMORY MANAGEMENT
.I bzip2 
compresses large files in blocks.  The block size affects
both the compression ratio achieved, and the amount of memory needed for
compression and decompression.  The flags \-1 through \-9
specify the block size to be 100,000 bytes through 900,000 bytes (the
default) respectively.  At decompression time, the block size used for
compression is read from the header of the compressed file, and
.I bunzip2
then allocates itself just enough memory to decompress
the file.  Since block sizes are stored in compressed files, it follows
that the flags \-1 to \-9 are irrelevant to and so ignored
during decompression.

Compression and decompression requirements, 
in bytes, can be estimated as:

       Compression:   400k + ( 8 x block size )

       Decompression: 100k + ( 4 x block size ), or
                      100k + ( 2.5 x block size )

Larger block sizes give rapidly diminishing marginal returns.  Most of
the compression comes from the first two or three hundred k of block
size, a fact worth bearing in mind when using
.I bzip2
on small machines.
It is also important to appreciate that the decompression memory
requirement is set at compression time by the choice of block size.

For files compressed with the default 900k block size,
.I bunzip2
will require about 3700 kbytes to decompress.  To support decompression
of any file on a 4 megabyte machine, 
.I bunzip2
has an option to
decompress using approximately half this amount of memory, about 2300
kbytes.  Decompression speed is also halved, so you should use this
option only where necessary.  The relevant flag is -s.

In general, try and use the largest block size memory constraints allow,
since that maximises the compression achieved.  Compression and
decompression speed are virtually unaffected by block size.

Another significant point applies to files which fit in a single block
-- that means most files you'd encounter using a large block size.  The
amount of real memory touched is proportional to the size of the file,
since the file is smaller than a block.  For example, compressing a file
20,000 bytes long with the flag -9 will cause the compressor to
allocate around 7600k of memory, but only touch 400k + 20000 * 8 = 560
kbytes of it.  Similarly, the decompressor will allocate 3700k but only
touch 100k + 20000 * 4 = 180 kbytes.

Here is a table which summarises the maximum memory usage for different
block sizes.  Also recorded is the total compressed size for 14 files of
the Calgary Text Compression Corpus totalling 3,141,622 bytes.  This
column gives some feel for how compression varies with block size.
These figures tend to understate the advantage of larger block sizes for
larger files, since the Corpus is dominated by smaller files.

           Compress   Decompress   Decompress   Corpus
    Flag     usage      usage       -s usage     Size

     -1      1200k       500k         350k      914704
     -2      2000k       900k         600k      877703
     -3      2800k      1300k         850k      860338
     -4      3600k      1700k        1100k      846899
     -5      4400k      2100k        1350k      845160
     -6      5200k      2500k        1600k      838626
     -7      6100k      2900k        1850k      834096
     -8      6800k      3300k        2100k      828642
     -9      7600k      3700k        2350k      828642

.SH RECOVERING DATA FROM DAMAGED FILES
.I bzip2
compresses files in blocks, usually 900kbytes long.  Each
block is handled independently.  If a media or transmission error causes
a multi-block .bz2
file to become damaged, it may be possible to
recover data from the undamaged blocks in the file.

The compressed representation of each block is delimited by a 48-bit
pattern, which makes it possible to find the block boundaries with
reasonable certainty.  Each block also carries its own 32-bit CRC, so
damaged blocks can be distinguished from undamaged ones.

.I bzip2recover
is a simple program whose purpose is to search for
blocks in .bz2 files, and write each block out into its own .bz2 
file.  You can then use
.I bzip2 
\-t
to test the
integrity of the resulting files, and decompress those which are
undamaged.

.I bzip2recover
takes a single argument, the name of the damaged file, 
and writes a number of files "rec00001file.bz2",
"rec00002file.bz2", etc, containing the  extracted  blocks.
The  output  filenames  are  designed  so  that the use of
wildcards in subsequent processing -- for example,  
"bzip2 -dc  rec*file.bz2 > recovered_data" -- processes the files in
the correct order.

.I bzip2recover
should be of most use dealing with large .bz2
files,  as  these will contain many blocks.  It is clearly
futile to use it on damaged single-block  files,  since  a
damaged  block  cannot  be recovered.  If you wish to minimise 
any potential data loss through media  or  transmission errors, 
you might consider compressing with a smaller
block size.

.SH PERFORMANCE NOTES
The sorting phase of compression gathers together similar strings in the
file.  Because of this, files containing very long runs of repeated
symbols, like "aabaabaabaab ..."  (repeated several hundred times) may
compress more slowly than normal.  Versions 0.9.5 and above fare much
better than previous versions in this respect.  The ratio between
worst-case and average-case compression time is in the region of 10:1.
For previous versions, this figure was more like 100:1.  You can use the
\-vvvv option to monitor progress in great detail, if you want.

Decompression speed is unaffected by these phenomena.

.I bzip2
usually allocates several megabytes of memory to operate
in, and then charges all over it in a fairly random fashion.  This means
that performance, both for compressing and decompressing, is largely
determined by the speed at which your machine can service cache misses.
Because of this, small changes to the code to reduce the miss rate have
been observed to give disproportionately large performance improvements.
I imagine 
.I bzip2
will perform best on machines with very large caches.

.SH CAVEATS
I/O error messages are not as helpful as they could be.
.I bzip2
tries hard to detect I/O errors and exit cleanly, but the details of
what the problem is sometimes seem rather misleading.

This manual page pertains to version 1.0.2 of
.I bzip2.  
Compressed data created by this version is entirely forwards and
backwards compatible with the previous public releases, versions
0.1pl2, 0.9.0, 0.9.5, 1.0.0 and 1.0.1, but with the following
exception: 0.9.0 and above can correctly decompress multiple
concatenated compressed files.  0.1pl2 cannot do this; it will stop
after decompressing just the first file in the stream.

.I bzip2recover
versions prior to this one, 1.0.2, used 32-bit integers to represent
bit positions in compressed files, so it could not handle compressed
files more than 512 megabytes long.  Version 1.0.2 and above uses
64-bit ints on some platforms which support them (GNU supported
targets, and Windows).  To establish whether or not bzip2recover was
built with such a limitation, run it without arguments.  In any event
you can build yourself an unlimited version if you can recompile it
with MaybeUInt64 set to be an unsigned 64-bit integer.



.SH AUTHOR
Julian Seward, [e-mail].

http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2

The ideas embodied in
.I bzip2
are due to (at least) the following
people: Michael Burrows and David Wheeler (for the block sorting
transformation), David Wheeler (again, for the Huffman coder), Peter
Fenwick (for the structured coding model in the original
.I bzip,
and many refinements), and Alistair Moffat, Radford Neal and Ian Witten
(for the arithmetic coder in the original
.I bzip).  
I am much
indebted for their help, support and advice.  See the manual in the
source distribution for pointers to sources of documentation.  Christian
von Roques encouraged me to look for faster sorting algorithms, so as to
speed up compression.  Bela Lubkin encouraged me to improve the
worst-case compression performance.  
The bz* scripts are derived from those of GNU gzip.
Many people sent patches, helped
with portability problems, lent machines, gave advice and were generally
helpful.