Compress txt file

quinnd6

I have a .txt file that has grown to 1gb in size.
I need to find a way or compressing it and searching through it.

What would be the best way to compress it?

Should I zip it or compress it to a .rar file?

irlrobins

If it's a plain text file then you probably can't compress it much more. And if you zip it you'll still have to extract it to view/search it.

I use baretail to view large files.

quinnd6

Whoops sorry its actually a .log file

irlrobins

That's just the file extension. It's probably a plain text file.

sh_o

irlrobins wrote:

If it's a plain text file then you probably can't compress it much more. And if you zip it you'll still have to extract it to view/search it.

I use baretail to view large files.

With respect, plain text files are great for compressing, they will compress very well!
For large text log files, I use gzip on a linux environment to compress the files. I can then search the compressed files using zmore filename | grep searchstring

compressing log files will normally really give great results, see for example this apache log file compression:
[sh@www tmp]$ ls -l access_log
-rw-r--r-- 1 shane shane 62166579 Sep 3 16:18 access_log
[sh@www tmp]$ gzip access_log
[sh@www tmp]$ ls -l access_log.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 shane shane 3746946 Sep 3 16:18 access_log.gz

irlrobins

Ignore what I said, I'm talking bollix. :rolleyes:

quinnd6

Im using windows so I think Ill zip it.

thanks anyway

Capt'n Midnight

If using windows, you are probably using NTFS, right click the file or folder and change the compress attribute, transparent , the OS does all the work.

http://www.7zip.org beats winzip , you can also use 7za.exe at the command prompt

also 7zip includes source code if you want to do some programming

Cantab.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

If using windows, you are probably using NTFS, right click the file or folder and change the compress attribute, transparent , the OS does all the work.

http://www.7zip.org beats winzip , you can also use 7za.exe at the command prompt

also 7zip includes source code if you want to do some programming

I'll second 7-zip. Can't stand that WinZip 'use evaluation version' lark.

Evil Phil

I'm a winrar man myself.