Question about Samtools Mpileup -u option

[clintp]

I may have missed something way back when, but what is the deal with samtools mpileup's '-u' option? It says it stands for "uncompressed" output. If you leave it off, you get the text version of the pileup, which is useful (and not what I would call "compressed"--the logical opposite of "uncompressed").

Can you use this file in bcftools ever? Or is it that you have to do what I do and just regenerate the pileup with the '-u' option.