lzip is a
free
Free may refer to:
Concept
* Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything
* Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism
* Emancipate, to procur ...
,
command-line tool for the compression of data; it employs the
Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) with a user interface that is familiar to users of usual Unix compression tools, such as
gzip and
bzip2.
Like
gzip and
bzip2,
concatenation is supported to compress multiple files, but the convention is to bundle a file that is an archive itself, such as those created by the
tar or
cpio Unix programs. Lzip can split the output for the creation of multivolume archives.
The file that is produced by lzip is usually given
.lz as its
filename extension, and the data is described by the
media type
A media type (also known as a MIME type) is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication o ...
application/lzip.
The lzip suite of programs was written in
C++ and
C by Antonio Diaz Diaz and is being distributed as
free software under the terms of version 2 or later of the
GNU General Public License (GPL).
History
7-Zip was released in 2000; a tool employing LZMA first became available on
Unix-like operating systems in 2004 when a port of the command-line version of 7-Zip (p7zip) was released. In the same year, the LZMA
SDK became available, which included the program called “lzma_alone”; less than a year later, Lasse Collin released ''LZMA Utils'', which at first only consisted of a set of wrapper scripts implementing a gzip-like interface to lzma_alone. In 2008, Antonio Diaz Diaz released lzip, which uses a
container format
A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notab ...
with checksums and
magic numbers instead of the raw LZMA data stream, providing a complete Unix-style solution for using LZMA. Nevertheless, LZMA Utils was extended to have similar features and then renamed to
XZ Utils.
Features
File integrity
lzip is capable of creating archives with independently decompressible data sections called a "multimember archive" (as well as split output for the creation of multivolume archives).
For example, if the underlying file is a tar archive, this can allow extracting any undamaged files, even if other parts of the archive are damaged.
As for the file format, special emphasis has been put on enabling
integrity checks by means of an integrated 32-bit
checksum for each compressed stream; this is used in combination with the lziprecover program to detect and reconstruct damaged data. This recovery tool can merge multiple copies of an archive where each copy may have damage in a different part of the file.
Parallelism
lzip has two parallel interfaces provided in the default distribution.
* compresses any file in a parallel way. Using it with is insufficient, since the conventional program needs the entire stream before a file to locate it for decompression, resulting in non-parallel extraction.
* combines and into a parallel archiver much like modern archivers like RAR or 7-Zip. The
solid compression blocks align with file boundaries, so extracting a file only requires decompressing that particular member block.
Adoption
Availability
In popular Linux distributions, lzip can usually be installed from official package repositories.
Cygwin
Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed.
The Cygwin in ...
offers lzip as a maintained optional package (Archive category of its setup installer), and its GNU tar utility program has support for .lz archives (with --lzip option for creation).
MinGW-w64 distributes lzip through a maintained package in
MSYS2 (pacman -S lzip).
Lzip is also available for Android in a terminal-interface which was ported by
Master-Console Inc.
Support
* The
GNU Autotools support lzip. Adding
dist-lzip to
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE will build lzip-ed
tarballs.
* Versions 1.23 and newer of GNU tar support using lzip to handle compressed files transparently.
* GNOME's archiving tool, ''
Archive Manager
Archive Manager (previously File Roller) is the file archiver of the GNOME desktop environment.
Archive Manager can:
* Create and modify archives
* View the content of an archive
* View a file contained in the archive
* Extract files from the a ...
'', supports lzip files.
Application
* The Linux distribution ''
Dragora GNU/Linux-Libre'' employs lzip for its software packages.
* Lzip is used to distribute the
Time Zone Database
The tz database is a collaborative compilation of information about the world's time zones, primarily intended for use with computer programs and operating systems. Paul Eggert is its current editor and maintainer, with the organizational backi ...
from IANA, and the GNU version of the Linux kernel.
* The
European Parliament publishes complete dumps of its database in JSON format compressed with lzip.
* Lzip is used in NASA's
Planetary Data System (PDS).
See also
*
Lossless data compression
References
External links
*
Lzip format specificationLzip format specification at IETF
{{Archive formats
Free data compression software