compress

vt. [Unix] When used without a qualifier, generally refers to crunch ing of
a file using a particular C implementation of compression by Joseph M. Orost
et al.: and widely circulated via Usenet ; use of crunch itself in this
sense is rare among Unix hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the
Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in A Technique for High Performance
Data Compression , Terry A. Welch, IEEE Computer , vol. 17, no. 6 (June
1984), pp. 8--19.