ZIP tools were really a great innovation within the last 10 years. They are able to compress text by factor 10 and most EXE files by about factor 2. The most often used tool is definetely Winzip. But, as it is shareware (and not too cheap for everybody in your company), you can find a very useful freeware with similar features as well:
7Zip which can be free downloaded and used (real freeware!) at the following place: (below 1MB !)
Download from "7-zip.org"
7Zip has the following great features:
As example for the compression ratio we compared the following:
"The GIMP 1.2.4 for Windows after full installation"
(127 subfolders, 1304 files totaling 27,128,826 bytes)
| Archiver | Compressed size | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| 7-Zip (7z format) | 5445402 | 100% |
| WinRAR 3.10 | 6004155 | 110% |
| WinAce 2.3 | 6242424 | 115% |
| CABARC 1.0 | 6455327 | 119% |
| 7-Zip (zip format) | 9461621 | 174% |
| PKZIP 2.50 | 9842800 | 181% |
Usually 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than other zip compatible programs.
As SAP customer, you will know CAR (car.exe) or SAPCAR (sapcar.exe) as well. These tools are similar and are having the same compression ratio. They are used for all SAP patches and deliveries, because this tool is available on any from SAP supported platform. It uses an Unix similar syntax as e.g. "sapcar -xvf file.sar" for decompressing the files. If you are having CAR or SAR files to decompress, you have to use this tool, as Winzip, Winrar, 7-Zip, Easyzip 2000 and so on are NOT compatible with these files. Up to 4.6B SAP used CAR.EXE. This tool can compress ("car -cvf file.car ...") and decompress CAR files. As of 4.6C this tool was enhanced and then renamed to SAPCAR.EXE. This tool can still work wtih CAR files, but is able to work with the newer SAR files as well. So, you may want to download SAPCAR instead of CAR.| back | 10/04/2024, 20:13:29 |