Can you imagine compressing a file by 100%, i.e. compacting a file to 0 bytes? Sounds too astonishing. Well, don't be stupefied when you read that its possible to compress
any file to 0 bytes.
BARF! or Better Archiver with Recursive Functionality can achieve a file compression of 100% by recursively compressing the file. The BARF compressor will compress
any nonempty file by at least one byte. Thus,by compressing already compressed files over and over again, it is possible to eventually reduce any file to 0 bytes.
BARF isfree, open source software, released under the GNU GPL. Its code is written in C/C++ and can be downloaded from the BARF
webpage.
How it Works?BARF uses recursive compression to compress the file. BARF compresses the files by using one of the 257 compression algorithms by selecting the best one at each stage of recursion. At each step it adds an extension
.x or .x?? to the existing filename. This technique ensures that there is no disambiguation while decompressing the files.
To try it out, read the steps on my
blog.
