xref: /illumos-gate/usr/src/man/man1/compress.1 (revision 6523a3aa7f325d64841382707603be7a86e68147) 

 Sun Microsystems, Inc. gratefully acknowledges The Open Group for
 permission to reproduce portions of its copyrighted documentation.
 Original documentation from The Open Group can be obtained online at
 http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/.

 The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open
 Group, have given us permission to reprint portions of their
 documentation.

 In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions
 of the system documentation.

 Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form
 in the SunOS Reference Manual, from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition,
 Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System
 Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6,
 Copyright (C) 2001-2004 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
 Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy
 between these versions and the original IEEE and The Open Group
 Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee
 document. The original Standard can be obtained online at
 http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html.

 This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.

 The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
 You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

 You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
 or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
 See the License for the specific language governing permissions
 and limitations under the License.

 When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
 file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
 If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
 fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying
 information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]


 Copyright 1989 AT&T
 Portions Copyright (c) 1992, X/Open Company Limited All Rights Reserved
 Copyright (c) 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 COMPRESS 1 "Feb 5, 2020"
 NAME
compress, uncompress, zcat - compress, uncompress files or display expanded
files

 SYNOPSIS
compress [-fv/] [-b bits] [file]...






compress -c [-fv] [-b bits] [file]






uncompress [-fv] [-c | -/] [file]...






zcat [file]...




 DESCRIPTION
 "compress"
The compress utility attempts to reduce the size of the named files by
using adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding. Except when the output is to the standard
output, each file is replaced by one with the extension .Z, while
keeping the same ownership modes, change times and modification times, ACLs,
and extended attributes. The compress utility also attempts to set the owner and
group of file.Z to the owner and group of file, but does not fail
if this cannot be done. If appending the .Z to the file pathname would
make the pathname exceed 1023 bytes, the command fails. If no files are
specified, the standard input is compressed to the standard output.


The amount of compression obtained depends on the size of the input, the number
of bits per code, and the distribution of common substrings. Typically,
text such as source code or English is reduced by 50-60%. Compression is
generally much better than that achieved by Huffman coding (as used in
pack(1)) and it takes less time to compute. The bits parameter
specified during compression is encoded within the compressed file, along with
a magic number to ensure that neither decompression of random data nor
recompression of compressed data is subsequently allowed.

 "uncompress"
The uncompress utility restores files to their original state after they
have been compressed using the compress utility. If no files are
specified, the standard input is uncompressed to the standard output.


This utility supports the uncompressing of any files produced by
compress. For files produced by compress on other systems,
uncompress supports 9- to 16-bit compression (see -b).

 "zcat"
The zcat utility writes to standard output the uncompressed form of files
that have been compressed using compress. It is the equivalent of
uncompress -c. Input files are not affected.

 OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-b bits


Sets the upper limit (in bits) for common substring codes. bits must be
between 9 and 16 (16 is the default). Lowering the number of bits result in
larger, less compressed files.



-c


Writes to the standard output; no files are changed and no .Z files are
created. The behavior of zcat is identical to that of `uncompress
-c'.



-f


When compressing, forces compression of file, even if it does not
actually reduce the size of the file, or if the corresponding
file.Z file already exists.
If the -f option is not specified, and the process is not running in the
background, prompts to verify whether an existing file should be overwritten.
If the response is affirmative, the existing file is overwritten. When
uncompressing, does not prompt for overwriting files. If the -f option is
not specified, and the process is not running in the background, prompts to
verify whether an existing file should be overwritten. If the standard input is
not a terminal and -f is not specified, writes a diagnostic message to
standard error and exits with a status greater than 0.



-v


Verbose. Writes to standard error messages concerning the percentage reduction
or expansion of each file.



-/


When compressing or decompressing, copies any extended system attributes
associated with the source file to the target file and copies any extended
system attributes associated with extended attributes of the source file to the
corresponding extended attributes associated with the target file. If any
extended system attributes cannot be copied, the original file is retained, a
diagnostic is written to stderr, and the final exit status is
non-zero.




 OPERANDS
The following operand is supported:
file


A path name of a file to be compressed by compress, uncompressed by
uncompress, or whose uncompressed form is written to standard out by
zcat. If file is -, or if no file is specified, the
standard input is used.




 USAGE
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of compress,
uncompress, and zcat when encountering files greater than or equal
to 2 Gbyte (2^31 bytes).

 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables
that affect the execution of compress, uncompress, and zcat:
LANG, LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES,
and NLSPATH.


Affirmative responses are processed using the extended regular expression
defined for the yesexpr keyword in the LC_MESSAGES category of the
user's locale. The locale specified in the LC_COLLATE category defines
the behavior of ranges, equivalence classes, and multi-character collating
elements used in the expression defined for yesexpr. The locale specified
in LC_CTYPE determines the locale for interpretation of sequences of
bytes of text data a characters, the behavior of character classes used in the
expression defined for the yesexpr. See locale(5).

 EXIT STATUS
The following error values are returned:
0


Successful completion.



1


An error occurred.



2


One or more files were not compressed because they would have increased in size
(and the -f option was not specified).



>2


An error occurred.




 ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:






ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE
CSI Enabled
Interface Stability Committed
Standard See standards(5).



 SEE ALSO
ln(1), pack(1), fgetattr(3C), fsetattr(3C),
attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), locale(5),
standards(5)

 DIAGNOSTICS
Usage: compress [-fv/] [-b maxbits] [file\|.\|.\|. ]


compress c [-fv] [-b maxbits] [file]


Invalid options were specified on the command line.



Usage: uncompress [-fv] [-c | -/] [file]...


Invalid options were specified on the command line.



Missing maxbits


Maxbits must follow -b, or invalid maxbits, not a numeric value.



file: not in compressed format


The file specified to uncompress has not been compressed.



file: compressed with xxbits, can only handle yybits


file was compressed by a program that could deal with more bits
than the compress code on this machine. Recompress the file with smaller
bits.



file: already has .\|Z suffix -- no change


The file is assumed to be already compressed. Rename the file and try again.



file already exists; do you wish to overwrite (yes or no)?


Respond y if you want the output file to be replaced; n if not.



uncompress: corrupt input


A SIGSEGV violation was detected, which usually means that the input file
is corrupted.



Compression:xx.xx%


Percentage of the input saved by compression. (Relevant only for -v.)



- - not a regular file: unchanged


When the input file is not a regular file, (such as a directory), it is left
unaltered.



- - has xx other links: unchanged


The input file has links; it is left unchanged. See ln(1) for more
information.



- - file unchanged


No savings are achieved by compression. The input remains uncompressed.



- -filename too long to tack on .Z


The path name is too long to append the .Z suffix.



- -cannot preserve extended attributes. file unchanged


Extended system attributes could not be copied.




 NOTES
Although compressed files are compatible between machines with large memory,
-b 12 should be used for file transfer to architectures with a small
process data space (64KB or less).


compress should be more flexible about the existence of the .\|Z
suffix.