compress
1. To feed data through any compression algorithm.
2. <tool> The Unix program "compress", now largely supplanted by gzip.
Unix compress was written in C by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods et al., and
was widely circulated via Usenet. It uses the Lempel-Ziv Welch algorithm and
normally produces files with the suffix ".Z".
Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine-bit codes are output until
they are all used. When this occurs, ten-bit codes are used and so on, until an
implementation-dependent maximum is reached.
After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is checked. If it is
decreasing then the entire string table is discarded and information is
collected from scratch.
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