> > [Amazingly, empty filesystems compress very well the second time.. from
> > 1474560 bytes to 1995 to 641 bytes, for an empty MSDOS disk!]
> 
> Youch, why not just
>  		% dd if=/dev/fd0a | gzip -9 > dos.gz

Because compressing it again makes it even smaller?

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1024 | gzip | wc -c
    1051
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1024 | gzip -9 | wc -c
    1051
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1024 | gzip | gzip | wc -c
      59
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=1024 | gzip -9 | gzip -9 | wc -c
      60

--apb (Alan Barrett)