Re: QSHELL JAR Documentation

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 4:11 PM Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I agree that jar doesn't always give the smallest result. 7Zip is
available for IBM i - I don't remember if it's a cost item, though.

Even if its not free, its easy enough to compile with GCC, which I believe
is free with the december TRs.

We happen to have a zip command in QShell on our machines - it's
Info-Zip - I don't know if we bought it.

Info-zip is open source so if IBM charges you for it, compile it yourself
http://www.info-zip.org/. Its the same zip binary on linux. They also have
an ugly windows gui I used to be fond of before I discovered 7zip (which
has an ugly but powerful windows GUI in addition to command line
executable) and farmanager.

There is a programmer's toolkit from IBM that may have zip/unzip -
5733-PTL is the ID, IIRC. It's free - and there's a downloadable set of
utilities that has maybe yet another version.

For some reason I seem to recall an option - number from 0-9 - that
controlled the level of compression - but it's been several years and I
am not sure.

Most compressors have a 0-9 option, but a 5 on one is not going to give you
the same results as a 5 on another. A non-lossy compression algorithm is
defined by its decompressor, but people smarter than me have been
improving pkzip compressors for decades. Granted I'm sure some of it has
to do with bigger CPUs allowing for more expensive algorithms to be tried.