The UNIX compress command is one of the earlier applications of LZW. The size of the dictionary is adaptive. We start with a dictionary of size 512. This means that the transmitted codewords are 9 bits long. Once the dictionary has filled up, the size of the dictionary is doubled to 1024 entries. The codewords transmitted at this point have 10 bits. The size of the dictionary is progressively doubled as it fills up. In this way, during the earlier part of the coding process when the strings in the dictionary are not very long, the codewords used to encode them also have fewer bits. The maximum size of the codeword, bmax, can be set by the user to between 9 and 16, with 16 bits being the default. Once the dictionary contains 2bmax entries, compress becomes a static dictionary coding technique. At this point the algorithm monitors the compression ratio. If the compression ratio falls below a threshold, the dictionary is flushed, and the dictionary building process is restarted. This way, the dictionary always reflects the local characteristics of the source.
