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CPR is a command-line compression tool that makes use of Huffman Coding, which is a type of variable-length encoding

Usage

A compression format based on huffman coding 


cpr [OPTIONS] files...


POSITIONALS:
  files FILES                 The file(s) to compress/decompress 

OPTIONS:
  -h,     --help              Print this help message and exit 
  -o,     --out FILE          Save the (de)compressed data to a file 
  -c, -e, --compress, --encode Excludes: --decompress 
                              Compress the file(s) 
  -d,     --decompress, --decode Excludes: --compress --print-frequency 
                              Decompress the file(s) 
  -t,     --print-frequency Excludes: --decompress 
                              Print the frequency table 
  -C,     --print-codebook    Print the character encoding 
  -p,     --print             Print the output of (de)compression 
  -O,     --no-extract        Do not reconstruct files, even when not using -p

Common Operations

1. Compress file(s)

cpr FILES -c

2. Compress file with archive name

cpr FILES -co my_archive.cprx

3. Decompress a file

cpr my_archive.cprx -d

4. Inspect an archive's contents

cpr my_archive.cprx -dp

5. View how a file will be encoded

cpr FILES -ctCp

Building

First clone the repo, and enter the project directory

git clone https://github.com/4jamesccraven/CPR.git
cd CPR

If you have just installed, you can simply run just build; otherwise do the following:

cmake -S . -B build
# parallel flag optional, speeds up build time.
cmake --build build --parallel $(nproc)

If you have nix with flakes enabled, you can play around with it in a shell by running nix shell github:4jamesccraven/CPR

Motivation & Limitations

This is mostly a toy example of Huffman Encoding, and it is not ideal for general use. Notably, The encoding process (unintentionally) un-nests all sub directories. I may fix it eventually, I may not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯