zip和gzip文件区别

zip vs gzip:

• zip和gzip(gz)不兼容，虽然它们都是使用相同的deflate压缩算法
• zip更像一个打包器，能把多个多件放到一个zip中；gzip一次只对一个文件压缩，通常与tar命令一起用

摘自http://www.netlib.org/gnu/gzip/readme

zip is an archiver: it compresses several files into a single archive file. gzip is a simple compressor: each file is compressed separately. Both share the same compression and decompression code for the 'deflate' method. unzip can also decompress old zip archives (implode, shrink and reduce methods). gunzip can also decompress files created by compress and pack. zip 1.9 and gzip do not support compression methods other than deflation. (zip 1.0 supports shrink and implode). Better compression methods may be added in future versions of gzip. zip will always stick to absolute compatibility with pkzip, it is thus constrained by PKWare, which is a commercial company. The gzip header format is deliberately different from that of pkzip to avoid such a constraint.

On Unix, gzip is mostly useful in combination with tar. GNU tar 1.11.2 has a -z option to invoke gzip automatically. "tar -z" compresses better than zip, since gzip can then take advantage of redundancy between distinct files. The drawback is that you must scan the whole tar.gz file in order to extract a single file near the end; unzip can directly seek to the end of the zip file. There is no overhead when you extract the whole archive anyway. If a member of a .zip archive is damaged, other files can still be recovered. If a .tar.gz file is damaged, files beyond the failure point cannot be recovered. (Future versions of gzip will have error recovery features.)