Freeze/Melt
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Revision as of 14:49, 23 February 2013 by Dan Tobias (Talk | contribs)
Freeze is a file compression utility used from the command line in Unix-style operating systems. Melt is the corresponding decompressor. It is considered obsolete now in favor of gzip.
A two-pass compression is done with a Lempel-Zev algorithm on the first pass and a dynamic Huffman algorithm on the second. The characteristics of the Huffman table used are added to the file. File attributes, ownership, etc., are preserved, and a .F extension is added. A two-byte magic number is prepended to the file (\037\236 octal for versions 1.x, and \037\237 for later versions).
References
- Man page (in NOAA site, which should know something about freezing!)
- Source code
