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COMPRESS(1) OpenBSD Reference Manual COMPRESS(1) NAME compress, uncompress - compress and expand data SYNOPSIS compress [-cftgOqv] [-b bits] [-o filename] [file ...] uncompress [-cftoqv] [-o filename] [file ...] DESCRIPTION Compress reduces the size of the named files using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding. Each file is renamed to the same name plus the extension ``.Z''. As many of the modification time, access time, file flags, file mode, us- er ID, and group ID as allowed by permissions are retained in the new file. If compression would not reduce the size of a file, the file is ignored. Uncompress restores the compressed files to their original form, renaming the files by deleting the ``.Z'' extension. If renaming the files would cause files to be overwritten and the stan- dard input device is a terminal, the user is prompted (on the standard error output) for confirmation. If prompting is not possible or confir- mation is not received, the files are not overwritten. If no files are specified, the standard input is compressed or uncom- pressed to the standard output. If either the input and output files are not regular files, the checks for reduction in size and file overwriting are not performed, the input file is not removed, and the attributes of the input file are not retained. The options are as follows: -b Specify the bits code limit (see below). -c Compressed or uncompressed output is written to the standard out- put. No files are modified. -d Decompress the source files instead of compressing them. -f Force compression of file, even if it is not actually reduced in size. Additionally, files are overwritten without prompting for confirmation. -g Use deflate scheme wich reported to provide better compression rates. -O Use old compression method (default is based on the program name). -o Set the output file name. -t Test the entefrity of each file leaving any files intact. -q Be quite, suppress any messages. -v Print the percentage reduction of each file. Compress uses a modified Lempel-Ziv algorithm. 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 (the default is 16). Bits must be between 9 and 16. After the bits limit is reached, compress periodically checks the com- pression ratio. If it is increasing, compress continues to use the ex- isting 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. The -b flag is omitted for uncompress since the bits parameter specified during compression is encoded within the output, along with a magic num- ber 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. Typ- ically, text such as source code or English is reduced by 50-60%. Com- pression is generally much better than that achieved by Huffman coding (as used in the historical command pack), or adaptive Huffman coding (as used in the historical command compact), and takes less time to compute. The compress utility exits 0 on success, 1 if an error occurs, and 2 if one or more files were not compressed because they would have grown in size (and -f was not specifed). SEE ALSO Welch, Terry A., "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", IEEE Computer, 17:6, pp. 8-19, June, 1984. STANDARDS The compress utility is compliant with the IEEE Std1003.2-1992 (``POSIX.2'') specification. HISTORY The compress command appeared in 4.3BSD. The deflate compression support added in OpenBSD 2.1. 4.3 Berkeley Distribution April 18, 1994 2
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