COMPRESS(1) | General Commands Manual | COMPRESS(1) |
compress
,
uncompress
, zcat
—
compress and expand data (compress mode)
compress |
[-123456789cdfghlNnOqrtv ]
[-b bits]
[-o filename]
[-S suffix]
[file ...] |
uncompress |
[-cfhlNnqrtv ] [-o
filename] [file ...] |
zcat |
[-fghqr ] [file ...] |
The compress
utility reduces the size of
the named files using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding, in compress mode. If
invoked as compress
-g
, the
deflate mode of compression is chosen; see
gzip(1) for more information.
Each file is renamed to the same name plus the extension “.Z”.
As many of the modification time, access time, file flags, file mode, user
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 (unless
-f
is used).
The uncompress
utility restores compressed
files to their original form, renaming the files by removing the extension
(or by using the stored name if the -N
flag is
specified). It has the ability to restore files compressed by both
compress
and
gzip(1), recognising the
following extensions: “.Z”, “-Z”,
“_Z”, “.gz”, “-gz”,
“_gz”, “.tgz”, “-tgz”,
“_tgz”, “.taz”, “-taz”, and
“_taz”. Extensions ending in “tgz” and
“taz” are not removed when decompressing, instead they are
converted to “tar”.
The zcat
command is equivalent in
functionality to uncompress
-c
.
If renaming the files would cause files to be overwritten and the standard input device is a terminal, the user is prompted (on the standard error output) for confirmation. If prompting is not possible or confirmation is not received, the files are not overwritten.
If no files are specified, the standard input is compressed or uncompressed to the standard output. If either the input or 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.
By default, when compressing using the deflate scheme
(-g
), the original file name and time stamp are
stored in the compressed file. When uncompressing, this information is not
used. Instead, the uncompressed file inherits the time stamp of the
compressed version and the uncompressed file name is generated from the name
of the compressed file as described above. These defaults may be overridden
by the -N
and -n
flags,
described below.
The options are as follows:
-1...9
-1
to -9
. Compression
factor -1
is the fastest, but provides a poorer
level of compression. Compression factor -9
provides the best level of compression, but is relatively slow. The
default is -6
. This option implies
-g
.-b
bits-c
zcat
mode).-d
uncompress
mode).-f
compress
and if the option
-c
is also given, copy the input data without
change to the standard output: let zcat
behave as
cat(1).-g
-h
-l
If the -v
option is specified, the
following additional information is printed:
-n
option is
specified, the time stamp stored in the compressed file is printed
instead).-N
-g
) is used.-n
-O
-o
filename-q
-r
compress
will descend into
specified directories.-S
suffix-t
-v
compress
uses a modified Lempel-Ziv
algorithm (LZW). 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. bits must
be between 9 and 16 (the default is 16).
After the bits limit is reached,
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.
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% using compress
.
Compression 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 with one of the
following values:
-f
was not specified and compression would have
resulted in a size increase.
The uncompress
and zcat
utilities exit 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
gzexe(1), gzip(1), zdiff(1), zforce(1), zmore(1), znew(1), compress(3)
Welch, Terry A., A Technique for High Performance Data Compression, IEEE Computer, 17:6, pp. 8-19, June, 1984.
The compress
,
uncompress
, and zcat
utilities are compliant with the X/Open System Interfaces option of the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification.
The compress
flags
[-123456789dghlNnOoqrSt
],
uncompress
flags
[-hlNnoqrt
], and the zcat
flags [-fghqr
] are extensions to that
specification.
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008
(“POSIX.1”) specifies a maximum bits limit
(-b
) of 14 to "achieve portability to all
systems".
The compress
command appeared in
4.3BSD. Deflate compression support was added in
OpenBSD 2.1.
March 17, 2014 | OpenBSD-5.6 |