Compressing a file in place - does "gzip -c file | dd of=file" really work?
Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 20263400 viewsConfidence Score0%
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Problem
In the question How can I compress a file on Linux in-place, without using additional disk space?, one answer proposes to simply use I tried it (on Debian Linux), and it does appear to work. I don't quite understand why, however. Doesn't truncate its output file before writing? Wouldn't this "pull …
Error Output
gzip -c file | dd of=file
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Fix for: Compressing a file in place - does "gzip -c file | dd of=file" really work?
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Experiment shows that this does not work. I created a 2-megabyte file from , then tried the above command on it. Here are the results: Obviously a 2-megabyte random file won't compress to 25 bytes, and in fact running on the compressed file yields a…
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