It is sometimes useful to reduce the amount of space taken by specific files. It is often done to files before they are transfered from a system to another through a network, especially if the connection is slow.
In fact, most public domain packages downloaded using ftp or another method have been compressed with a utility.
Table 11.1 based on [][p. 84]EK:UNIX displays a number of compression utilities. , pack and gzip are common in UNIX and will be discussed next.
Table 11.1: Common Compression Programs.