compress
When used without a qualifier, generally refers to
{compression} of a file using a particular {C} implementation
of compression for {Unix} by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods
et al. widely circulated via {Usenet}. compress 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 descreasing then the entire string table is
discarded and information is collected from scratch.
[{Jargon File}]
(1996-10-20)