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- The options -Z, --compress, and --uncompress all require that there be a
- 'compress' utility installed on the system. If there is no compress installed
- on your system, you will get errors if you try to use these options to tar.
-
- Unfortunately, the algorithm used by compress is encumbered, and therefore
- this utility is not part of Debian.
-
- The gunzip package can uncompress a file created with compress, but gzip can
- not create a file in 'compress' format. Since the tar -Z option and friends
- end up calling 'compress' or 'compress -d', support for these options is not
- available in Debian. However, at the time of this writing a package called
- 'ncompress' exists in non-free, and you can install it if the license terms
- are acceptable to you.
-
- Alternatively, if you don't really care what the format of the resulting file
- is, you could always create a 'compress' that is a symlink to gzip. I refuse
- to do that in either the tar or gzip packages, however, since what gzip creates
- is a compressed file, but not a 'compress' format file...
-