Gzip

Gzip is based on the 'deflate' algorithm, which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. 'Deflate' was developed in response to patents that covered LZW and other compression algorithms and limited the usability of 'compress' and other popular archivers.

In order to make it easier to develop software that uses compression, the Zlib library was created. It supports the Gzip file format and 'deflate' compression. The library is widely used, because of its small size, efficiency and versatility, although since the late-1990s there has been some movement from gzip to bzip2 which produces somewhat smaller files.

The Zlib compressed data format, the 'deflate' algorithm and the Gzip file format were standardised respectively as RFC 1950, RFC 1951 and RFC 1952.

Read further

• Gzip Home Page (http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/gzip)
• Zlib Home Page (http://www.zlib.org)