Is there a way to uncompress .Z files using php?

Question

Is there a way to uncompress .Z files using php?

Answer 1

After searching some i've found that .z files are files that were compressed using the compress program. If your php installation allows shell_exec and your webserver is running unix/linux you could run the uncompress program on your server. This is the (untested) idea:

<?php
$file = '/tmp/archive.z';
shell_exec("uncompress $file");

Answer 2

Nowadays uncompress is just nothing more than a one-liner invoking gzip with proper options. To use gzip, you don't have execute shell. You can use Zlib extension instead. I'd try something like:

<?php
$contents = zlib_decode(file_get_contents('/path/file.Z'));