8 Zip vs bzip2

8 Zip has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

bzip2 is a free data compressor for creating and reading compressed files. It provides command-line tools and supports BZ2 (.bz2), BZ (.bz), TBZ2 (.tbz2), and TBZ (.tbz) formats. The maker says its compression typically comes within 10% to 15% of the best available PPM-family techniques, while running around twice as fast for compression and six times faster for decompression. Its limited media-error recovery may allow undamaged portions of a damaged file to be decompressed. The separate libbzip2 library lets programs read and write .bz2 files or compress data in memory. Command-line flags resemble GNU Gzip's, and the distribution should compile without modification on Unix and Win32 systems. bzip2 dates to 1996 and is open source under a BSD-style license. The official site lists version 1.0.8 as stable and offers source code, not executables. Building has a good chance of success with an ANSI C compiler and at least 8 megabytes of spare memory; the source tarball includes documentation in several formats.