Re: Why use a Unix Pipe to uncompress a file?

• Pat Howe <PHowe_at_verisign.com>

> I am trying to work thru the one of the scripts that I inherited and I was
> wondering if someone could shed some light on why the author used a UNIX
> PIPE to uncompress a file.

Few reasons:

(1) Many file systems blow up w/ files > 2GB, they are a

    mess in any case. Dumping the output to a pipe avoids     the issue, so long as the sqished output is < 2GB.

(2) If you dump the output to a flat file then you need

    the dump space + zip output space. Dumping to a named     pipe puts only the squished stuff on media.

(3) Saving Truly Large (tm) files to the disk causes

    much more kernel overhead than spitting the data     into a pipe; savings there is time and overhead     (leaves more cycles and I/O bandwidth avilable for     other proc's running on the box).

--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
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