Compact (Unix)

compact is an old Unix file compression utility and compressed file format, similar in function to pack and compress. It uses adaptive Huffman coding. It was developed by Colin L. McMaster.

It has companion utilities named  and.

Compacted files have a capitalized ".C" suffix.

Identification
Compacted files most likely start with bytes.

However, is also possible, depending on how the software was configured at compile time. It's not clear what the intent was.

Software
Source code:
 * http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/43bsd/usr/src/old/compact/
 * https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/4.3BSD/src.tar.gz → old/compact/*

Links

 * Ultrix man page
 * HP-UX man page