It is easy for this data to begin to consume large amounts of disk storage. And, while the price of disk space has dropped considerably in recent years, it is still an overwhelming task to provide the data storage that a whole campus could use on our central facilities. The backup function alone begins to take longer and longer, possibly degrading system performance while it is executing the backup. So some housekeeping is in order. Therefore we urge you to take some time to learn a little bit about compression and uncompression of files.
Many patterns tend to repeat themselves in computer files.
This is particularly true of text files. Various compression algorithms have been developed over the years to take advantage of this repetition and to replace them with special, shortened coded patterns. There is one missing link here. Your Fortran or C programs cannot generate compressed files directly. While piping might hold some promise here, in general it will be easier for you to generate the full file and then immediately compress it.