Other terms lzw stands for Lempel, Ziv, and Welch, the researchers who invented one of the most popular compression algorithms, and licensed it to Unisys. To compress a file, assuming you have linemode access to your operating system, type the name of the program followed by the name of the file you want to compress. In most cases you can add multiple filenames at the end if you have more than one file to compress. On a Mac, click your file to pick it up, and drop it onto the StuffIt icon. You can also run StuffIt and manually pick the file with the dialog box in the normal way, and pick a compression type to use.
Most compression systems are publically available.
Compressed files are binary files, and cannot be sent by email in their raw form. If you need to send compressed or archived files by email, then you should again refer to the document on Encoding and Decoding . PKunzip and gzip will decompress .zip and .gz files respectively. UnStuffIt will undo pretty much any kind of compressed file. In the case of linemode access, type the name of the decompression program followed by the name of the compressed file, eg uncompress mythesis.