compre.sh

A combined compress(1) and uuencode(1) implementation for bash/ksh

How does it work?

LZW encoding is a variable bit width dictionary lookup typically done with a hash keyed by a couple (prev,cur). I use the filesystem instead to respresent a trie, with the byte values as directory names, and a single file e to store the dictionary index.

This is not very fast, and it's best to keep the COMPRESH_BITS setting low. If you're patient (and the filesystem is ample), you can try setting it to the compress(1) default of 16.

Enjoy!