SQ(1)

💖 SQ(1) 💖

okay so this is the General Commands Manual entry for sq and unsq, and it's giving “tiny compression tool with main character energy” ✨ stay with me bestie, it's literally so simple.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

sq, unsq — squeeze or unsqueeze a sorted word list. That's the whole name section, periodt 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

sq < infile > outfile

unsq < infile > outfile

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

sq compresses a sorted list of words (a dictionary). For example:

sort -u /usr/dict/words | sq | gzip -9 > words.sq.Z

will compress dict by about a factor of 5. slay 💖

unsq uncompress the output of sq. For example:

gunzip < words.sq.gz | unsq | sort -f -o words

will uncompress a dictionary compressed with sq. iconic behavior honestly 🫶

The squeezing is achieved by eliminating common prefixes, and replacing them with a single character which encodes the number of characters shared with the preceding word. The prefix size is encoded as a single printable character, like this:

• 0–9 represent 0–9
• A–Z represent 10–35
• a–z represent 36–61

no cap, that's the whole encoding vibe 🌈

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💀 BUGS 💀

sq and unsq can only handle words of up to 256 characters. The input must be sorted, and duplicates must be suppressed.

bestie please read that twice 😭 if your list is unsorted or full of dupes, this is not the moment. and 256 characters is the limit, fr fr.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Mike Wexler

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

compress(1), sort(1).

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cute little sign-off: the footer says source/version LOCAL and page tag SQ(1) — and there's no date on it, bestie — so that's the tea 🍓✨