xtrac is a file compression program that converts files to the .xtr format. It is ideal for files with multiple repeating words or phrases.
Files must be text files encoded in ASCII.Though any text files might work, it works better on the following
- Human languages in any script delimited by space, comma, period.
- Programming language source code.
- Markup languages like XML, HTML and DSL like CSS.
xtrac is available both as a non-GUI service as well as user-friendly terminal GUI. It can be called with parameters specifying the files to be compressed either from terminal or from another application.
xtrac can currently work only on text files, particularly ASCII characters(8-bit). There is no support for UNICODE(16-bit). Though it can be run on binary files, compression is not guaranteed. The compression ratio depends largely on the contents of the file; particularly files with many repeating elements such as song lyrics, source code etc. have better compression.
The GUI front end depends on ncurses. If the client system doesn't have ncurses pre-installed then linking will fail.