Re: nnml compression: state of the art?

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

* Bill White <billw@wolfram.com>  on Thu, 29 Mar 2001
| Is it possible nowadays to have gnus automatically gzip nnml files
| when they're written?

I don't know.  I haven't used it myself in years.  Back then it was read
only.  Though if you are using nnml you may not get the results you might
expect.  Depends on your filesystem's block size.  For example, if you are
using 4K blocks, the smallest chunk of disk that can be allocated is 4K.
If a message is 3.9K it will take one 4K block.  If you compress it to 2.5K
it will still consume one 4K block.  So you save nothing.

The most efficient thing would be to occasionally run a find command like
this:

  find $HOME/Mail \
    -name ".overview" -prune -o \
    -name "*.gz" -prune -o \
    -type f -size +4k -print | xargs gzip -1

substituting your filesystem's block size in the +4k segment.  This will
skip compressing .overview files and files that are already compressed.
Anything more than minimal compression will not gain you much.

| If so, is it then possible for some tool to grep the unzipped files?

zgrep
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