Subject: bug#24371: Bad value of size with --list

From: Mark Adler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2016 22:57:07 -0600

On Sep 5, 2016, at 7:45 PM, Jim Meyering <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Since there is nothing in gzip that can be changed to address this,
> I'm closing the ticket.

Well, technically there is, but it could be argued that the fix is not in the spirit of -l, i.e. not O(1) in time. The fix is that gzip could decompress the entire file without writing it, a la -t, and count the number of uncompressed bytes, which would be O(n).

pigz -l does what gzip -l does, O(1), but pigz -lt guarantees the correct uncompressed size by reading and decompressing the entire file, O(n).

Mark