Perl

Compress a File to Gzip with Custom Metadata

See more Gzip Examples

This example demonstrates how to use the CompressFile method to create a Gzip (.gz) file while customizing the metadata embedded in the Gzip header.

Before compression, several properties are set:

• Comment: Adds a descriptive comment to the Gzip file.
• Filename: Specifies the filename to embed in the Gzip data, which may be used by extraction tools as the default output name.
• CompressionLevel: Controls the tradeoff between compression ratio and speed (set to maximum in this example).
• LastModStr: Sets the last-modified timestamp using an RFC 822 formatted date string.

After setting these properties, the input file is compressed and written to a .gz file. This approach allows you to embed meaningful metadata along with the compressed data.

Chilkat2 Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

# This example demonstrates how to compress a file to Gzip format
# while setting custom metadata such as comment, filename,
# compression level, and last-modified date.

my $gzip = Chilkat2::Gzip->new;

# Set custom Gzip properties:
$gzip->Comment('Example Gzip file created with Chilkat');
$gzip->Filename('custom_name.txt');
$gzip->CompressionLevel(9);
$gzip->LastModStr('Wed, 1 Apr 2025 12:45:26 -0500');

# The file to be compressed:
my $inputFile = 'example.txt';
my $outputFile = 'example.txt.gz';

# Compress the file:
my $success = $gzip->CompressFile($inputFile, $outputFile);
if (!$success) {
    print $gzip->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

print "Compression successful.\n";
print 'Gzip file created: ', $outputFile, "\n";