compress (Unix)

File Format
Name	compress (Unix)
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Compression compress (Unix) ; ; ;
Extension(s)	.Z
MIME Type(s)	application/x-compress
Wikidata ID	Q29209269
Released	~1984

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.

Files begin with bytes 1f 9d.