Defect in XCU compress, uncompress, zcat

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        Defect report from : Jon Hitchcock , none

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@ page 0 line 10297 section compress, uncompress, zcat comment {jjh105}

Problem:

Edition of Specification (Year): 2004

Defect code :  1. Error

The portable use of compress, uncompress and zcat appears to be limited because 
the standard allows for systems that do not support adaptive Lempel-Ziv coding.

The last of the LZW patents listed at www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw exipred 
yesterday, so there is little reason for compression not to be implemented on 
systems that support the XSI option.

Also, the specification says that the interchange of compressed files between 
implementations is not required.  But to my knowledge, in practice the 
compressed files are portable. 

Action:

Simplify the standard at the next revision by requiring systems that support 
the XSI option to implement compression using the commonly-used format.  This 
would obviously need a difinition of the format.