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                 File:  bzip2-0.1pl2.zip
           Author:  Michael Griebling (grieblm@inforamp.net)
         Release:  V0.1pl2 for BeOS, 27 Sep 1997
Compatibility:  PR
        Location:  contrib/utilities
    Description:  Gzip-like utility with much better compression.
             Notes:  Now includes precompiled binaries.
Bzip2  compresses  files  using the Burrows-Wheeler block-sorting 
text compression algorithm,  and  Huffman  coding.
Compression  is  generally  considerably  better than that
achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors,
and  approaches  the performance of the PPM family of statistical 
compressors.  It is around twice as fast at compression and six
times faster at decompression than other compressors and it
is patent-free.  This archive includes a pre-compiled version for
BeOS and DOS.

The command-line options are deliberately very similar  to
those of GNU Gzip, but they are not identical.

This program is a descendant of the bzip program,  version
 0.21,  which  I released in August 1996.  The primary difference 
of bzip2 is its avoidance of the possibly patented
algorithms  which  were  used  in 0.21.  bzip2 also brings
various useful refinements (-s,  -t),  uses  less  memory,
decompresses  significantly  faster,  and  has support for
recovering data from damaged files.
 
I only ported this package to the BeOS so please direct 
your comments and questions to the original author Julian 
Seward at: jseward@acm.org or visit his home page 
at http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk/
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