One Gb Of A

[silentabe939]

Okay so I have an odd question. What would a .txt document that consists of nothing but the lowercase "a" character repeated to fill one gigabyte of space look like? How many pages would that be following MLA format? How small of a file could i compress that to? Finally is there some way to write a program that would acomplish the task of creating a 1gb "a" file? Thanks for the help.

[hhhhhx]

How many pages would that be following MLA format?
depends, are you using a header, and also a works cited page?

[jpkotta]

Okay so I have an odd question. What would a .txt document that consists of nothing but the lowercase "a" character repeated to fill one gigabyte of space look like? How many pages would that be following MLA format? How small of a file could i compress that to? Finally is there some way to write a program that would acomplish the task of creating a 1gb "a" file? Thanks for the help.

That is an odd question. Care to say why you want to know?

The file would look very monotonous.

I don't know about MLA any more. I haven't used that braindead style since high school.

It should compress to a very small size. In fact, files with compression ratios like that are dangerous. They're called tarbombs, and can be used to maliciously fill someone's hard disk.

It's easy to create the file with a shell script:


echo -n a > file
for i in $(seq 1 15) ; do
cat file file > temp
cat temp temp > file
done

[happysmileman]

It should compress to a very small size. In fact, files with compression ratios like that are dangerous. They're called tarbombs, and can be used to maliciously fill someone's hard disk.

Yup, I've seen 7MB zip files that decompress to over 100GB. In theory a GB of 'a' could probably be compressed to FAR less than a megabyte, but I'm not sure exactly how the compression/decompression systems work.

[jpkotta]

Yup, I've seen 7MB zip files that decompress to over 100GB. In theory a GB of 'a' could probably be compressed to FAR less than a megabyte, but I'm not sure exactly how the compression/decompression systems work.

I got mine to compress to 768 bytes with bzip2. How much it compresses is dependent upon what you define as a decompressor. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity. The only information in the file is that it contains 2^30 'a's.