I compressed a file in a terminal with compress file.txt and got (as expected) file.txt.Z
When I pass that file to ioutil.ReadFile in Go,
buf0, err := ioutil.ReadFile("file.txt.Z")
I get the error (the line above is 116):
finder_test.go:116: lzw: invalid code
I found that Go would accept the file if I compress it using the compress/lzw package, I just used code from a website that does that. I only modified the line
outputFile, err := os.Create("file.txt.lzw")
I changed the .lzw to .Z. then used the resulting file.txt.Z in the Go code at the top, and it worked fine, no error.
Note: file.txt is 16.0 kB, unix-compressed file.txt.Z is 7.8 kB, and go-compressed file.txt.Z is 8.2 kB
Now, I was trying to understand why this happened. So, I tried to run
uncompress.real file.txt.Z
and it did not work. I got
file.txt.Z: not in compressed format
I need to use a compressor (preferably unix-compress) to compress files using lzw-compression then use the same compressed files on two different algorithms, one written in C and the other in Go, because I intend to compare the performance of the two algorithms. The C program will only accept the files compressed with unix-compress and the Go program will only accept the files compressed with Go's compress/lzw.
Can someone explain why that happened? Why are the two .Z files not equivalent? How can I overcome this?
Note: I am working on Ubuntu installed in VirtualBox on a Mac.
