gzip/gunzip

Because of prioprietary code in the compress utility, the Free Software Foundation, as part of their GNU project, wrote the gzip/gunzip utilities, and made them available to end users at no charge.

The result is that a large protion of public domain packages are now compressed using that utility. gzip uses the Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77) to reduce the size of the file.

Usage is very similar to compress and pack:

gzip [-vc] filename

-v

displays the compression ration.

-c

sends the compressed output to standart out and leaves the original file intact.

gunzip can uncompress files originally compressed with compress, gzip or pack.

It can also take the ``-c" option to send output to standard output.