compress (Unix)
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
- This article is about a specific file format. For compression in general, see Compression.
compress is a Unix command line utility, and a general-purpose compressed file format. Its compression algorithm is based on LZW.
Contents |
Identifiers
The conventional filename extension is a capitalized .Z.
Identification
Files begin with bytes 1f 9d.
See also
- SCO compress LZH - variant
- Quasijarus Strong Compression - variant
- pack (Unix) - predecessor
- compact (Unix) - predecessor
- Squash (RISC OS)
Formats that could be considered to be the successors of compress include Freeze/Melt, and (especially) Gzip.
