MS-DOS installation compression

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File Format
Name MS-DOS installation compression
Ontology
Extension(s) .??_
PRONOM fmt/462
fmt/469

A pair of compression formats by Microsoft that appear on MS-DOS and early Windows (3.x) installation disks; the formats have no generally agreed-upon name. Compressed files may be generated by the COMPRESS.EXE program (appearing in Microsoft's Setup Toolkit for Visual C++), and uncompressed with the EXPAND.EXE program distributed with Windows and MS-DOS. Compressed files have the last character of the file extension replaced with an underscore (or dollar sign).

There are reports of the Google Chrome installer needing the EXPAND.EXE program.

Identification

File begin with bytes 53 5A 44 44 88 F0 27 33 ("SZDD" variant), or 4B 57 41 4A 88 F0 27 D1 ("KWAJ" variant).

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