gzip (GNU zip) is a compression utility designed to be a replacement for compress. Its main advantages over compress are much better compression and freedom from patented algorithms. It has been adopted by the GNU project and is now relatively popular on the Internet.
Gzip is a UNIX-oriented utility, and as such, it has little hope of dealing well with RMS files whose record format is anything exotic. It is able to deal with most common text file formats, at the cost of not determining a size (in bytes) or calculating a CRC checksum for any files.
For a more versatile compressor-archiver with greater RMS capability, see the Info-ZIP Home Page.
/ftp/gzip/gzip-1_3_12b_vms/vms_notes.txt
/ftp/gzip/gzip-1_3_12b_vms/gzip-1_3_12b_vms.zip
The Zip archive for this kit was created using the Zip "-V" option to preserve the VMS file attributes, but the source files in this Zip archive should be usable on a non-VMS system. The VMS port notes mentioned above (and included in the kit) describe how to restore the original mixed-case and/or multi-dot file names in the kit which have been altered to accomodate the more limited VMS ODS2 file system where this work was done.
All versions of Gzip for VMS, including older and experimental ones, may be found at the archive: /ftp/gzip/
FTP access is also available at: ftp://ftp.antinode.info/gzip/