Compact (Gene Olson)

compact is an obscure file compression utility, and associated file format, developed by Gene H. Olson. It appears to have been abandoned early on, due to patent concerns.

It uses LZW compression. It is essentially an improved version of compress, with an incompatible format. The recommended filename suffix is a capitalized .W.

It is not related to the older compact format that uses adaptive Huffman coding.

Identification
There is a big-endian format, which starts with bytes, and a little-endian format, which starts with.

Software

 * compact_sV.tar.Z - Source distribution