Compress (Unix)

File Format
Name	Compress (Unix)
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Compression Compress (Unix)
Extension(s)	.Z, .z
MIME Type(s)	application/x-compress

compress is a Unix command line utility, and a general-purpose compressed file format. Its compression algorithm is based on LZW.

Identifiers

The conventional filename extension is a capitalized .Z. We list lowercase .z as well, only because filename extensions are not usually thought of as being case-sensitive.

See also

• pack - A compressed file format with a similar filename extension.

Software

• gzip can uncompress compressed files.

External links

• Wikipedia article