Does anyone know why system logs (/var/log/*) are customarily compressed using bzip2?
I know “less” will read them (based on: Less FAQ).
This blog got me think’n about it:
How To Think About Compression | The Changelog
Thank you.
To save space?
Or are you asking if some other compression method should be used? gzip (used in the past) doesn’t compress so well and 7zip isn’t in widespread use yet. Maybe some day something better than bzip2 will be used. Since old logs aren’t viewed very often, and anyway decompression is much faster than compression, this isn’t a major issue.
Yes. It was more of a, I wonder why bzip2. Were any performance tests done, or is it just historical.
Thank you.