WANProxy - Additional included tools.

WANProxy.org

Tools

tack

The tack utility is a standalone stream compressor that uses the same compression code WANProxy does. It is the program for which the compression code was originally developed and is part of the source distribution today as it is very useful for debugging, performance testing and in file deduplication, particularly through the use of a persistent dictionary using the -p parameter.

Its usage is very straightforward, when given the -c argument, it will act as a compressor, when given -d a decompressor. If the -h argument is given, a hash of the format used by WANProxy's compression codec internally will be generated and output for every 128-byte block of input.

In all cases, output goes to standard output and input comes from either standard input or named files passed as command line arguments. The -Q option may be specified to disable output (useful for micro- and macrobenchmarks.)

The -T option can be used to get timing information about compression and decompression operations and -S will show individual time samples for each operation. The -S option requires the -T option. Timing information goes to standard error using the common WANProxy logging mechanism. Timing samples go to standard error. The -s option enabled reporting of compression ratios.

The -E flag may be specified to make -T, -S and -s options give per-file information rather than information for the whole run of tack when multiple files are given on the command line.

xcdump

The xcdump utility can take a stream encoded using the WANProxy compression algorithm and print a human-readable description of the contents of the encoded stream, i.e. the exact sequence of references and declarations that are used. Like tack, its output goes to standard output and input comes from either standard input or named files passed as command line arguments.