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Comment by ceratin6 | Hacker News Reader

It’s all these modern smokers with their low-tar cigarettes.

Tar is tar. Let it be.

tar -czvf if you’re gzzy.

tar+gzip beats zip for most uses. I don’t know about whether 7z beats tar+gz, but I don’t think 7z is as ubiquitous, though that may not be true now.

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And in case you didn't already know, there is a parallel implementation of gzip called "pigz" that functions just like gzip, but is super fast on a machine with lots of cores.. like many modern PC's! Say for example you have a 32 core amd machine, the speed up is awesome using pigz.

tar also wins by making it trivial to swap the compression; these days I personally favor .tar.xz or .tar.zstd over gzip.

It's a shame zstd is Facebook, because it's really awesome.

zstd is BSD 3-clause.

Facebook produces tons of great FOSS, it's paid for with very dirty money, but I don't consider it tainted.

And Zstd was created before the creator joined Facebook

7zip always seemed really shady, almost intentionally so compared to zip and tar+gz. Always gave me the "leet haxor" vibe. 7zip makes me feel like I need to wash my hands.

7zip was a really old format for compatibility with 7-bit data streams. I used it all the time with packet radio in the early 90s. A bit like zipping and then base64 encoding does.

But I don't know how it got to the wares/hacker scene from there. I assume they will also have dropped the 7 bit thing as it would reduce efficiency by 1/8th on modern systems.

That's likely a different 7zip. The 7z format was invented in 1999, and the Wikipedia page [0] doesn't say anything about 7-bit compatibility. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z

Edit: as another commenter rightly points out, it's likely unrelated. Here's the changelog: https://www.7-zip.org/history.txt That said the first entry at the bottom dates back to 2.00, so it's possible there was a 1.0 that predates this changelog:

2.00 Beta 1 1999-01-02 - Original beta version.

I'm pretty sure its popularity increased because it was one of the few options on Windows that was completely free to install with no nag screens, ever. It had a decent right-click menu; excellent usability for its time. And you wouldn't be tempted to use an older copy such as whatever shipped with Windows XP to extract archives. Plus it offered compatibility with all other formats including its own, and eventually apps like Firefox publicly shipped with 7zip Self-Extractors and such. And if you wanted to test whether 7zip really was more efficient, you could quickly try compressing files using different options - in my personal testing, 7zip often won back then. Not sure if results have changed recently given there are a few new compression techniques these days.

The 7z format is also a massive, MASSIVE over-engineered mess, that is basically impossible to actually implement full support for.

You don't even need the - tar is so tar

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