GZIP, and PKZIP?
[*] Zip is an archive file format, popularized on PCs, that contains multiple compressed files. GZIP comes from Gnu. It is essentially a one file subset of the Zip format. You can’t put a whole directory into a GZIP archive, just a single file. It’s intended for compressing a tarball of many files. PKZIP is a set of commercially available programs that create Zip files. All three use the deflate compression format, which is based on the LZ77 algorithm. This compression is also used by the ZLIB library and hence the PNG graphics file format (which uses ZLIB). PNG – Portable Network Graphics – provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and TIFF. An alternative compression technology, LZW compression, is encumbered by Unisys’s patent. LZW is used in GIF files and by the Unix compress command. Luckily, as well as being free from patent restrictions, LZ77 also gives better compression than LZW. LZW is the initial letters of the last names of the three computer scientists who developed the a
