Compressing your files helps to save hard drive space. We encourage everyone to compress files over 100,000 bytes. There are two ways to compress files compress and gzip. Compressed files can be identified by the extension .Z (for compressed files) and .gz (for gzipped files). To compress a file use gzip -9 filename (you can also use 'compress filename' but gzip -9 does a more effective job). To uncompress a gzip file, simply type gunzip filename.

For more information type 'man gzip' in an xterm window.