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Is it possible to compress a very large file (~30 GB) using gzip? If so, what commands, switches, and options should I use?

Or is there another program (preferably one commonly available on Ubuntu distributions) that I can use to compress/zip very large files? Do you have any experience with this?

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2 Answers

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AFAIK there is no limit of size for gzip - at least not 30GB. Of course, you need the space for the zipped file on your disc, both versions will be there simultanously while compressing.

bzip2 compresses files (not only big ones :-) better, but it is (sometimes a lot) slower.

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bzip2 is especially good at compressing source code (and the like). It is a good competitor to gzip for generic use too. Availability for gzip across different operating systems is better than bzip2 – jippie Jun 3 '12 at 19:20
Is bzip2 lossless compression? Thanks. – Andrew Jun 3 '12 at 20:03
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@Andrew Yes, gzip/bzip2/etc... are all lossless. – Renan Jun 3 '12 at 20:06
And there is pbzip, too - that will use more than one CPU-core. But still way slower than gzip. – Nils Jun 10 '12 at 20:45
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if you need a good compresion rate, you can try lzma. it is faster and more efficient than bzip2 and may be faster even than gzip (i don't know that for sure)

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/06/lzma-better-compression-than-bzip2-on-unix-linux/

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