Decrypting A File Information that is available on the internet is often stored in a format that is compressed or encoded in a special format in order to save space or make the information easily tranportable from one computer to the other. This document will attempt to explain why these various formats are used, and provide the information on how to translate these formats into something that is useful. An example program which accomplishes this task is the tar program.
Compression programs create one compressed file for each input file.
Example programs are freeze, yabba, compress, gzip . Often programs will combine the functionality of both a compressor and an archiver by either compressing files and then archiving them, or by archiving files and then compressing the archive. Some programs which accomplish this dual functionality are arc, arj, lha, zip, zoo . Data encoding involves the translation of data in one form to another. The most popular use for this is sending information via e-mail.