Algorithm used in compress/decompress ?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <vadi.671773259 at judy.cs.iastate.edu> vadi at cs.iastate.edu (Vadivelu Elumalai) writes:
>I want to know the algorithm used in the unix text compression utilities 
>compress/decompress.

It's basically the Limpel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) scheme, which is a dynamic
dictionary method that encodes variable-length "runs" of bytes.

There was a basic summary of compression methods posted just the other
day to the Usenet "comp.compression" newsgroup; if you haven't yet
expired it you should read that article.