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The .ace compression format is rather legacy, but you still find the occasional old file compressed in it, and p7zip-full won’t extract ‘em. There’s a package in Ubuntu 10.04 called unace, and you’d expect this to do the job – only it doesn’t. It’s version 1.2 which is absolutely legacy…. I mean seriously, it’s archaic – and it won’t extract “modern” .ace files.

So, to get this all sorted, just head on over to Softpedia and grab unace v2.5 (which itself was built in 2003!), extract the tar.gz, and then either use the unace binary from where it is or sling it in your /usr/bin/ directory for convenience.

Decompression achieved.

Prince Rupert’s Drops are just molten glass dropped into a bucket of ice water, where they form tadpole like shapes. Nothing too exciting so far…

But, as they cool so rapidly, the external area in contact with the icy water goes under super-high compression, which makes ‘em tough. And what happens when you break that tension? Find out!

There’s a video showing the fun part in more detail here.

Thank you, StumbleUpon! =D

Lets say you’ve got a bunch of folders taking up a large swathe of space which you never really use but want to keep, just not taking up stacks of your NAS… How can you easily compress them all up to individual archives of each folder? Dead easy:

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#!/bin/bash
for folder in */
do
  7z a -mx9 -mmt "${folder%/}.7z" "$folder"
done

Save that to a file, chmod +x it and run in the location you want to compress the folders. Every folder (and all contents within) will be compressed to its own foldername.7z archive.

With 7z, -mx9 is the flag for maximum compression, and -mmt says to use multiple CPUs to speed up compression, so omit that part if you’re on a single core machine.