On Jul 12, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
In bzip2 format, the stream is a sequence of blocks, and, at least as
I understand it, each block can be decompressed independently, so
seeking to a particular offset in the decompressed version of a
bzip2'ed stream involves seeking to the beginning of the block
containing the data at that offset, decompressing the block, and then
moving to the right offset within the decompressed data. The default,
and maximum, block size is 900K.
On the other hand
http://bzip.org/1.0.5/bzip2-manual-1.0.5.html
says
Further ahead, it would be nice to be able to do random access into
files. This will require some careful design of compressed file formats.
so perhaps I don't understand it correctly.
