achieving best compression

[alinaqvi90]

Hi

I have large log files to compress and the storage system is running out of space
The only compression utility available on my box is gzip.

To all you gurus out there .... whats the best way to achieve maximum compression?

My experties end at "gzip -9 x.log"
would tar ring the file make any diff?

thanks in advance

[kai12]

...you could just try

But yes, one large file should give you a better compression than many small files, Wikipedia points this out, too:

However a caveat to this is that archives containing a large number of small files end up significantly larger than if they were compressed as a single file (the classic example of the latter is the common tar.gz archive which consists of a TAR archive compressed using gzip).

Cheers, kai