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Description of the cat method

This is the Unix program that copies its input to the output. It isn't a compression method, but provides a benchmark for the simplest algorithm (i.e. none!) and very predictable compression performance (i.e. 8 bpc). It also highlights how the compression time per character is higher for smaller files due to startup overheads, and indicates how consistant the speed measurements are (the encode and decode times should be the same).



This page last updated Monday, January 08, 2001 by Matt Powell Department of Computer Science University of Canterbury