The BARF* compressor will compress any nonempty file by at least one byte. Thus, by compressing already compressed files over and over again, it is possible to eventually reduce any file to ZERO bytes.
You must be thinking that can also be done with Winrar or Winzip by compressing files over and over again. Is it? Wait, read the first line again, "The BARF compressor will compress any nonempty file by at least one byte." Winrar or Winzip can't do this!
BARF has been tested on the Calgary corpus, a well known benchmark. In just one pass, it achieves the best known result of any compressor, compressing all 14 files to 1 byte each. Run time is under 1 second on a 750 MHz PC. Of course these files can be compressed again down to 0 bytes each, just like any other file. (Yes, they can be decompressed correctly).
BARF is free, open source software, released under the GNU GPL.
Download BARF! (Windows executable, about 1 MB).
Source code:barf.cpp (includes compilation insructions)mkstring.cpp
Read more about BARF @ http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/barf.html
*Better Archiver with Recursive Functionality (BARF)
