Compress is a fast, simple LZW file compressor. Compress does not have the highest compression rate, but it is one of the fastest programs to compress data. Compress is the defacto standard in the UNIX community for compressing files.

The ncompress code is released into the public domain.

Also note that all existing patents on the LZW algorithm have expired world-wide.

The last "upstream" release will be supported in minor bug fix mode only. These will be the 4.2.4.x releases.

Anything above and beyond that will be the 4.2.5.x releases.

All releases will continue to be public domain.

4.2.4.3

• Check return value of chown().
• Fix from Fedora for checking malloc() return.
• Fix from Fedora/gzip to avoid integer overflow for CVE-2010-0001.

4.2.4.2

• Integrate build/man touchups from Debian.
• Add fix from Fedora for handling of 0 byte files.
• Pull in POSIX standard headers for prototypes (stdlib,string,unistd).
• Replace rindex() with strrchr().
• Don't set CC by default in Makefile.def and add CFLAGS/CPPFLAGS/LDFLAGS where appropriate by default.
• Add support for DESTDIR to the install target.

4.2.4.1

• Fix possible bss buffer underflow CVE-2006-1168
• New homepage http://ncompress.sourceforge.net/

4.2.4

• Last upstream release placed into the public domain.

You can find plenty of info on the LZW algorithm (just use Google), but for fun, here's some helpful links.

• LZW Wikipedia Entry
• LZW Data Compression by Mark Nelson
• LZW Encoding Discussion and Implementation by Michael Dipperstein
• LZW NIST Reference Page

Please use the mailing list to contact us:
ncompress Development List
Mailing List Archives/Signup/etc...

Developer:
Mike Frysinger