📦 Huff — Huffman Compression CLI (Rust)

huff is a fast, lightweight, and fully standalone Huffman-based file compressor written in Rust.
It supports:

• ✔️ Compressing .txt files into a custom .huff binary format
• ✔️ Decompressing .huff files back to original text
• ✔️ Optional parallel frequency counting with Rayon
• ✔️ Clean CLI interface using Clap
• ✔️ Extremely fast & memory-safe

This tool is ideal for learning compression algorithms, benchmarking performance, and experimenting with bit-level control.

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🚀 Features

• ⚡ High-performance Huffman coding
• 🧠 Custom binary format using bit-level encoding
• 🧵 Parallel processing support
• 🔧 Clean and readable CLI with help + flags
• 📦 Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows)

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🧩 Project Structure

src/
 ├── main.rs       # CLI logic (Clap)
 ├── huffman.rs    # Huffman encoding/decoding core
 ├── compression.rs    # Reading text file -> .huff file logic
Cargo.toml
README.md

🛠️ Installation

Linux / macOS

Build:

cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/huff /usr/local/bin/

🛠️ Installation

Windows

Build:

cargo build --release
copy target\release\huff.exe C:\Windows\System32\

📘 Usage

Help

huff --help

Compress a file

huff compress -i input.txt -o output.huff

Decompress a file

huff decompress -i output.huff -o recovered.txt

📄 Example

Compress

huff compress -i quotes.txt -o quotes.huff

Decompress

huff decompress -i quotes.huff -o quotes_restored.txt