Pigz!

[Marty]

Hey guys,
I just discovered a nifty little tool called pigz. Its basically a drop in replacement for gzip that allows you to compress / uncompress things using multiple cores. From what I can tell on my 6 core amd, its using 4 cores... This greatly speeds up the compression and decompression process. As I type this, I'm compressing a folder with 136,000 files inside consisting of a total of 80GB!

I'm not 100% sure this is the correct way to use it, but here's what I did.

First, install it.

Code:

sudo apt-get install pigz

Then I simply replace my gzip file with a symbolic link to pigz and use tar like normal.
Backup gzip...

Code:

sudo mv /bin/gzip /bin/gzip.old

and make the symbolic link.

Code:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /bin/gzip

Then you simply use tar and gzip like you normally would. You should notice much faster compression times of multiple files!

Typical tar usage is like this:
tar -zcvf prog-1-jan-2005.tar.gz /home/marty/prog

Enjoy!