ABSTRACT
The UNIX operating system has many commands for compressing and decompressing files and for performing various operations on compressed files. These commands include the traditional UNIX commands for compressing and decompressing files, compress and uncompress, and the GNU tools gzexe (compress executable files), gzip (for compressing files), gunzip (for uncompressing files that were compressed with gzip), zcat (for displaying compressed files; gzcat does the same), gzcmp (for comparing compressed files), gzforce (for forcing the .gz extension onto compressed files so that gzip will not compress them twice), gzmore (for displaying compressed files one page at a time), and gzgrep (the grep command for compressed files; it searches possibly compressed files for a regular expression). This section will primarily discuss file compression and decompression. Although the GNU tools (gzip and gunzip) are better than compress and uncompress commands, we discuss both sets of commands for completion.
7.2.1 The compress Command
