MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 1

compress(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities compress(1)
–f forces compression even if the resulting file is larger or the output file already exists.
When you do not specify this option, files which are larger after compression are not
compressed. compress does not print an error message if this happens.
–V prints the version number of compress.
–v prints statistics giving the amount of compression achieved. Statistics give the name
of each file compressed and the compression ratio, expressed as a percentage. If the
file resulting from compression is larger than the original, the compression ratio is
negative.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
compress uses the following environment variable:
PATH contains a list of directories for compress to search when looking for the
uncompress utility.
DIAGNOSTICS
Possible exit status values are:
0 Successful completion.
1 An error occurred.
2 One or more files were not compressed because the compressed version was larger than
the original.
Messages
Message: (–D) same count exceeded - aborting
Cause: When using the –D option, compress encountered a line where more than the
first 255 characters were identical to those of the previous line.
Action: Make sure that no two adjacent lines in a file being with –D have more than the
first 255 characters in common.
Message: Bits must be between num1 and num2
Cause: You specified a value for the maximum number of bits of compression with the
–b option that fell outside of the range num1 to num2.
Action: Specify a value that falls in the num1 to num2 range.
Message: can’t stat file "filename": system error
Cause: See syserror(3).
Action: See syserror(3).
1-124 Commands and Utilities