Abstract
bzip is a program written by Julian Seward that is often used under Unix to compress single files. It splits the file into blocks which are compressed individually using a combination of the Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation, the Move-To-Front algorithm, Huffman and Runlength encoding. The author himself stated that compressed blocks that are damaged, i.e., part of which are lost, are essentially non-recoverable. This paper gives a formal proof that this is indeed true: focusing on the Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation, the problem of completing a transformed string, such that the decoded string obeys certain file format restrictions, is NP-hard.
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hundt, C., Ochsenfahrt, U. (2008). Damaged BZip Files Are Difficult to Repair. In: Hu, X., Wang, J. (eds) Computing and Combinatorics. COCOON 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5092. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69733-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69733-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69732-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69733-6
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