7-Zip is lot more efficient at achieving high compression rates than most of the other popular compression tools(including gzip and bzip2). The difference in the sizes of compressed files was not trivial.

The second surprise was that none of my GNU/Linux systems understood the .7z format ‘out-of-the-box’. Alas, the format of the most popular Free compression tool for Windows is not even recognised by the most popular Free software on the planet. A quick Google-search resulted in the port of the 7-zip package for the GNU/Linux platform - p7zip - hosted on sourceforge.net website. Below are the simple commands that will get it installed on Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian systems. RPMs should be available.

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