compression_test

The small script in the scripts directory can be moved and altered to test out how different compression methods could work out for you. Top of the file has the settings that can be changed, like the directory that is being compressed. Best to run in the parent directory for ease of use, but if you know what you are doing, you can make it work anywhere. Runs in Bash, and might require some additional software.

Setup

It is expected that a few programs are installed. You could run it and just address each one as they error out, but the software being used are:

• time
• du
• zip
• rar
• tar
• 7za

For my Debian based Linux distro, I got everything I needed with:

sudo apt install zip rar p7zip-full

At the top of the script, there are two variables worth reviewing: directory_name - the name of the directory that will be archived verbose_output - true gives more output, but false is recommended

Execute

The default directory_name is set to "data". If this is correct, or if you go into the script and change the default name to the correct name, then the program just runs.

./compare_compressions.sh

In case it would help, you can provide the name of the directory you want to compress and it will overwrite the default option.

./compare_compressions.sh my_data

This will test out the compression on a directory labeled "my_data"

Notes

First, test this on a small or even empty directory, to make sure all software is available and the script runs correctly. On larger data, it might seem to stall due to suppressing output to make a cleaner result. On an empty directory, it should run in under a second.

This does create actual files for each of the compression types. If you are rather new to Linux and Bash, you can easily remove these files with:

rm data.\*

where data is the name of the directory. By adding in the . character, you won't risk deleting your directory, which is also guarded by the fact that the approriate flag was not provided to rm to delete a directory. You can add additional layers of caution with

rm -i data.\*

This will prompt you before each deletion. I would include this step into the script, but I am cautious when it comes to public code. Also, someone might want to do further comparisons on the archived data.