
Compress::Bzip2

Version 2.09

9 Aug 2005

The subdirectory bzlib-src contains almost all of the files from the
1.0.2 distribution of bzip2.  What's missing is that I only included
the html flavour of the documentation.  See the README in there for
more information.

DESCRIPTION
===========

This module provides a Perl interface to the bzip2 compression algorithms.
It uses the low level interface to the algorithm, and reimplements all
high level routines.

What is Bzip2 ?
===============
Bzip2 is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C.
It offers pretty fast compression and fast decompression.
Bzip2 has very good results, if you want to compress ASCII Documents.

Bzip2 is probably not great for streaming compression.  It fills it's
internal buffer, which depending of parameters is between 100k and 900k
in size, before it outputs ANY compressed data.  It works best compressing
an entire document.

Streaming decompression on the other hand, gives a steady torrent of bytes.

What is Perl-Bzip2 ?
====================
Perl-Bzip2 provides Bzip2 bindings for Perl5. I.e. you can access the
Bzip2 library from your Perl scripts thereby compressing ordinary
Perl files, streams, whatever.

It's my intent to make this package like the Compress::Zlib package, so
that code that uses one can fairly easily use the other.  The perlxs stuff
that's visible to perl has methods that have the same names as their
Compress::Zlib counterparts, except that the "g" is changed to a "b".

Most code that uses Compress::Zlib should be able to use this package.
Simply change

   $gz = Compress::Zlib::gzopen( "filename", "w" );

to

   $gz = Compress::Bzip2::gzopen( "filename", "w" );

I made aliases of all the Compress::Zlib functions.  Some of them don't
return anything useful, like crc32 or adler32, cause bzip2 doesn't
do that sort of thing.  Take a look at t/070-gzcomp.t and t/071-gzuncomp.t.

Bug fixes and other feedback are welcome.

Copyright
=========
bzip2
Julian Seward, j s e w a r d   a t   a c m . o r g

Compress-Bzip2 is distributed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License (GPL).  See the file COPYING.

Many Thanks to:
===============

Author of bzip2:
Julian Seward, j s e w a r d   a t   a c m . o r g
Cambridge, UK
http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2

Author of Compress::Zlib:
Paul Marquess, p m q s   a t   c p a n . o r g
http://www.cpan.org

Author of 1.x Compress::Bzip2 (1999)
Gawdi Azem <azemgi@rupert.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>
(last known email, no longer valid)

Sisyphus, helped out with win32 compatibility
s i s y p h u s 1   a t   o p t u s n e t . c o m . a u

Marco "Kiko" Carnut, author of Compress::Bzip2 1.03
k i k o   a t   t e m p e s t . c o m . b r

