how do passwords work?

newbie here. so consider this paradox: let's say you have a pass protected rar file. now the password should be stored somewhere in the file to compare against the inputted password. so if it's there how come you cant just extract it?

>>42
I don't think you know what are you talking about. You trolled me into testing this, I used C source files and compressed each one individually (worst case for lzma, which is designed for large amounts of data). For Deflate I used advancecomp at maximum settings. Deflate did win in some tiny files (<4KB compressed), but overall lzma was 7% smaller.

Once we use solid compression (I concatenated all the files together), lzma was leading by 28%.

I don't know why I bother - several distros and package systems have already switched to lzma, with more on the way. It's widely used on installers on other platforms too. Many embedded devices use it (my router does for example). Even friggin' WinZIP added it in a desperate attempt to remain relevant. The only reasons to use deflate are grossly underpowered hardware, or compatibility.

Next in /prog/: >>42 insists deflate is better than lzma, this time testing the common use case of compressing mp3 and jpeg files.