pigz: Equality among parallelized compression tools

Miguel called me out the other day, for including pbzip2 when I mentioned repeatedly that I wouldn’t include esoteric compression tools in this little adventure.

He’s right on the one hand, since pbzip2 — and now pigz — are specific to one particular algorithm. But they both do such cool things:

I don’t think I can add much more to the 1000 words that image is worth. Same flags and arrangement as pbzip2, only this time I used a 256Mb file of random characters, because I am impatient. 😈

I should offer the same caveat this time as I did last time: You may not see much improvement on a single-core machine.

And now for the daring feat of the day, jamming this, pbzip2 and parallel all into the same command …

ls random-{1,2}.txt | parallel pbzip2 -f -k -9 | parallel pigz -f -k -9

Let me just press enter and we’ll see if I spawn a singularity aga