COMPRESS(1)

NAME
compress, uncompress, zcat - compress and expand data

SYNOPSIS
compress [ -f ] [ -v ] [ -c ] [ -V ] [ -b bits ] [ name ... ]
uncompress [ -f ] [ -v ] [ -c ] [ -V ] [ name ... ]
zcat [ -V ] [ name ... ]

DESCRIPTION
Compress reduces the size of the named files using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding. Whenever possible, each file is replaced by one with the extension .Z, while keeping the same ownership modes, access and modification times. If no files are specified, the standard input is compressed to the standard output. Compressed files can be restored to their original form using uncompress or zcat.

The -f option will force compression of the named files. This is useful for compressing an entire directory, even if some of the files do not actually shrink. If -f is not given and compress is run in the foreground, the user is prompted as to whether an existing file should be overwritten.

The -c option makes compress/uncompress write to the standard output; no files are changed. The nondestructive behavior of zcat is identical to that of uncompress -c.

Compress uses the modified Lempel-Ziv algorithm popularized in A Technique for High Performance Data Compression , Terry A. Welch, IEEE Computer, vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19. Common substrings in the file are first replaced by 9-bit codes 257 and up. When code 512 is reached, the algorithm switches to 10-bit codes and continues to use more bits until the limit specified by the -b flag is reached (default 16). Bits must be between 9 and 16.

After the bits limit is attained, compress periodically checks the compression ratio. If it is increasing, compress continues to use the existing code dictionary. However, if the compression ratio decreases, compress discards the table of substrings and rebuilds it from scratch. This allows the algorithm to adapt to the next ``block'' of the file.

Note that the -b flag is omitted for uncompress, since the bits parameter specified during compression is encoded within the output, along with a magic number to ensure that neither decompression of random data nor recompression of compressed data is attempted.

The amount of compression obtained depends on the size of the input, the number of bits per code, and the distribution of common substrings. Typically, text such as source code or English is reduced by 50-60%. Compression is generally much better than that achieved by adaptive Huffman coding (compact), and takes less time to compute.

Under the -v option, a message is printed yielding the percentage of reduction for each file compressed.

If the -V option is specified, the current version and compile options are printed on stderr.

Exit status is normally 0; if the last file is larger after (attempted) compression, the status is 2; if an error occurs, exit status is 1.

SEE ALSO
compact(1)

DIAGNOSTICS

Usage: compress [-dfvcV] [-b maxbits] [file ...]
    Invalid options were specified on the command line.

Missing maxbits
    Maxbits must follow -b.

file: not in compressed format
    The file specified to uncompress has not been compressed.

file: compressed with xx bits, can only handle yy bits
    File was compressed by a program that could deal with more bits than the compress code on this machine. Recompress the file with smaller bits.

file: already has .Z suffix -- no change
    The file is assumed to be already compressed. Rename the file and try again.