I created a text file called rubbish.

I tried to compress it merely by writing thé compress command. I thought it would give me a compressed file called rubbish.Z

It did not work. What is the reason?

The following are the results of the commands. It is a plain text file I wrote.


[heden@h148n2fls301o1037 heden]$ file rubbish
rubbish: ASCII English text
[heden@h148n2fls301o1037 heden]$ compress rubbish
bash: compress: command not found


I wrote the gzip command and worked beautifully.
It created a file called rubbish.gz

you don't have the command "compress" in your PATH, most likely it isn't installed at all for legal reasons

use gzip (compress like, meant to replace it, as compressed was trapped in patents, making it illegal to create compress program in open source ... not that it stopped people)

also bzip2 is another good alternative, it compresses better then gzip, not is not as widely used (most modern distros have support for bzip2, but windows is lacking in this area ... tho if you can stomack msdos , there are utils to handle bzip2's in windows

I am using Mandrake 10.0 free version. I downloaded it from a site.
The gzip command works not the compress command.


The following is my path. Could you detect some strange aspects in the path?

[heden@h148n2fls301o1037 heden]$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin/:/usr/games:/home/heden/bin

Compress is an older compression utility written for unix. Linux generally uses gzip or bzip. If you are looking for a command you might try locate (command) or whereis (command).

The following is the answer from the whereis command. As you see it does not tell me the location.

[heden@h65n2fls301o1037 heden]$ whereis compress
compress:

Actually it gave you the answer...compress does not exist on your system. If it did, whereis would have told you its location!.