Compress (Unix)

File Format
Name	compress
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Compression compress ; ; ;
Extension(s)	.Z, .z
MIME Type(s)	application/x-compress

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. We list lowercase .z as well, only because filenames are not always case-sensitive.

Files begin with bytes 1f 9d.