Look-Up", Communications of the ACM, 31(8), pp.1008-1013.





 
RFC 1952             GZIP File Format Specification             May 1996


   [7] Schwaderer, W.D., "CRC Calculation", April 85 PC Tech Journal,
       pp.118-133.

   [8] ftp://ftp.adelaide.edu.au/pub/rocksoft/papers/crc_v3.txt,
       describing the CRC concept.

4. Security Considerations

   Any data compression method involves the reduction of redundancy in
   the data.  Consequently, any corruption of the data is likely to have
   severe effects and be difficult to correct.  Uncompressed text, on
   the other hand, will probably still be readable despite the presence
   of some corrupted bytes.

   It is recommended that systems using this data format provide some
   means of validating the integrity of the compressed data, such as by
   setting and checking the CRC-32 check value.

5. Acknowledgements

   Trademarks cited in this document are the property of their
   respective owners.

   Jean-Loup Gailly designed the gzip format and wrote, with Mark Adler,
   the related software described in this specification.  Glenn
   Randers-Pehrson converted this document to RFC and HTML format.

6. Author's Address

   L. Peter Deutsch
   Aladdin Enterprises
   203 Santa Margarita Ave.
   Menlo Park, CA 94025

   Phone: (415) 322-0103 (AM only)
   FAX:   (415) 322-1734
   EMail: <ghost@aladdin.com>

   Questions about the technical content of this specification can be
   sent by email to:

   Jean-Loup Gailly <gzip@prep.ai.mit.edu> and
   Mark Adler <madler@alumni.caltech.edu>

   Editorial comments on this specification can be sent by email to:

   L. Peter Deutsch <ghost@aladdin.com> and
   Glenn Randers-Pehrson <randeg@alumni.rpi.edu>




 
RFC 1952             GZIP File Format Specification             May 1996


7. Appendix: Jean-Loup Gailly's gzip utility

   The most widely used implementation of gzip compression, and the
   original documentation on which this specification is based, were
   created by Jean-Loup Gailly <gzip@prep.ai.mit.edu>.  Since this
   implementation is a de facto standard, we mention some more of its
   features here.  Again, the material in this section is not part of
   the specification per se, and implementations need not follow it to
   be compliant.

   When compressing or decompressing a file, gzip preserves the
   protection, ownership, and modification time attributes on the local
   file system, since there is no provision for representing protection
   attributes in the gzip file format itself.  Since the file format
   includes a modification time, the gzip decompressor provides a
   command line switch that assigns the modification time from the file,
   rather than the local modification time of the compressed input, to
   the decompressed output.

8. Appendix: Sample CRC Code

   The following sample code represents a practical implementation of
   the CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check). (See also ISO 3309 and ITU-T V.42
   for a formal specification.)

   The sample code is in the ANSI C programming language. Non C users
   may find it easier to read with these hints:

      &      Bitwise AND operator.
      ^      Bitwise exclusive-OR operator.
      >>     Bitwise right shift operator. When applied to an
             unsigned quantity, as here, right shift inserts zero
             bit(s) at the left.
      !      Logical NOT operator.