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From: | Craig Macdonald |
Subject: | Re: feature request: gzip/bzip support for sort |
Date: | Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:25:50 +0000 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (X11/20061206) |
Many thanks to Dan and others for the implementation.(I've failed to accomplish the bootstrap of the CVS sources - are there bootstrapped snapshots
available anywhere?)
For 'sort' the tradeoff is different than for 'tar'. We don't particularly care if the format is stable, since it's throwaway. And we want fast compression, whereas people generating tarballs often are willing to have way slower compression for a slightly higher compression ratio. (Plus, new versions of 'tar' allow arbitrary compressors anyway.)
Now that we have the ability to fork decompression processes, are we likely to see sort have the ability to open gzipped(or bzip2ed) files?For sorting a stream of compressed, this is obviously not required, but for merging,
this would reduce a substantial mess with zcats to fifos etc etc.However, I'd understand if it was decided not to, because unlike the temporary
files, there is an existing workable solution. Many thanks Craig Macdonald
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