Data is read from file or the standard input.
The name of the file to be uncompressed usually ends with .Z or with .gz . If this file already exists, uncompress asks if you want to overwrite it, unless you specify the -f option. For LZW-compressed files, the number of bits of compression is encoded in the compressed data, so the uncompress command automatically uses the correct number of bits. There is a slight loss of performance for this support. Windows NT 4.0.