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unixzipwc

Number of lines differ in text and zipped file

I zippded few files in unix and later found zipped files have different number of lines than the raw files.

>>wc -l
70308 /location/filename.txt
2931  /location/filename.zip

How's this possible?

Solution

  • In compression algorithm word/character is replaced by some binary sequence.

    let's suppose \n is replaced by 0011100 and some other character 'x' is replaced by 0001010(\n)

    so wc program search for sequence 0001010 in zip file and count of these can vary.