wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (11/17/88)
Before I make the whole world reach for their blow torches, let me correct something I said. I said the Unix compress used a Huffman coding. As usual, I was wrong!, I was thinking of the man page for pack and unpack(1) which predate compress. For the record, several kind people pointed out that compress now makes use of LZW coding. The net effect, however, is the same that for both pack and compress, the output for a short file is acutally larger than the source. For pack, the man page says that a file smaller than 3 disk blocks probably will not be worth packing. Eventhough compress exists on the 3b1 that I am typing this on, the accompanying manual seems to lack the man page! Looks like the descision to include compress was a last minute addition to the 3b1 version 3.51 release. In this case, "the exercise is left to the reader :-)". The 3b1 compress seems to be compatible with bsd 4.2. Thanks to John Nelson and Phil Karn for pointing this out. --Bill