Compress (Unix)


 * 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.

Identifiers
The conventional filename extension is a capitalized .Z.

Identification
Files begin with bytes.

The 0x1f compression family
There are several compressed file formats, with similar features, that begin with byte value (octal 037; decimal 31). We arbitrarily choose compress as the representative example, and list the formats here.

Software

 * ncompress
 * Gzip
 * 7-Zip
 * liblzw
 * Windows port of Compress utility