What's the best LZX program?

[iamaboringperson]

I just want to unarchive LZX files on my Peg, so it must work on MorphOS.  CLI prefered.

And another question:

Why do people use LZX? What are its advantages over LHA for example?

[amigamad]

This has morph os support

lzx repacker readme
lzx program download link

Dont know how good it is though. :-)

[fragment]

Errr, wasn't he looking for an unarchiver.. This one works on AOS, so should on MOS too...

[Piru]

I just want to unarchive LZX files on my Peg, so it must work on MorphOS. CLI prefered.

Use one of the unlzx tools provided, or the full blown LZX (includes free community keyfile) and apply Y2K fix. Usage is similar to that of LhA (lzx x).

Why do people use LZX? What are its advantages over LHA for example?

LZX crunches better than LhA.

[KennyR]

LZX is definitely a better packer than LhA. But since the compressor is not open source (I think Microsoft licenced it for their CAB files, no less), you won't get a MOS-native version (or any other kind of non 68k-native version).

Not that it matters...Hotspot JIT is very fast.

Don't worry about 68k compressors on MOS. I haven't found one that doesn't work yet (unless it opens an AGA screen, like the early PowerPacker progs). And unless you're (un)packing HUGE archives, JIT is fast easily enough.

LZX compresses better because of a nicer algorithm but also because it merges files together in chunks before compressing to get a better overall compression.

People who want to use LhA but hate it's not-so-hot compression can do a poor-man's route. Compare;

lha a somedirectory.lha somedirectory/#?

tar cf somedirectory.tar somedirectory/#?
lha a somedirectory.tar.lha somedirectory.tar

.. see the incredible gains in compression you get from merging files together. Actually I found that tar.lha files sometimes come in smaller than lzx ones

meow

[Karlos]

Ah, neko beat me to it.

I compressed a folder full of source code with lzx and the resulting archive was 1/3 the size of lha and 1/4 the size of zip :-o

[KennyR]

Tar'ing files first makes it easier for compression to do its work, especially for block-sorting compressors.

But it sucks.