dxcompress is a compression and decompression utility supporting multiple compression algorithms. It currently supports the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm, the DEFLATE (gzip) algorithm and the XZ compression format.

A single compress binary provides all the functionality. The scripts uncompress and zcat are also provided as synonyms for compress -d and compress -cd. Additional scripts gzip, gunzip, xz, unxz, and xzcat can also be installed for compatibility with other compression utilities.

The compress utility should support all options that are recognized by most compression utilities.

The compress, uncompress, and zcat utilities conform to the POSIX.1-2008 standard. All additional functionality required by the upcoming POSIX.1-202x standard is also provided.

dxcompress uses an autoconf-generated configure script to configure the build. When building from a git checkout, the configure script first needs to be regenerated by running the autogen.sh script. The release tarballs already contain the configure script.

The configure script accepts the usual options like --prefix to customize the installation. Run configure --help for more information. Additionally the --enable-wrapper=WRAPPERS option is also recogonized and causes additonal wrapper scripts to be installed that behave like the compression and decompression utilities for specific compression algorithms. WRAPPERS is a comma-separated list of utilities. Valid utilities are gzip (installing gzip and gunzip) and xz (installing xz, unxz, and xzcat).

After running the configure script, dxcompress can be built with make and installed with make install. A testsuite can be run with make check.

dxcompress is free software and is licensed under the terms of the ISC license. The full license terms can be found in the LICENSE file.