XZ Utils

XZ Utils (previously LZMA Utils) is a set of free command-line lossless data compressors, including LZMA and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows.

XZ Utils consists of two major components:

Various command shortcuts exist, such as lzma (for xz --format=lzma), unxz (for xz --decompress; analogous to gunzip) and xzcat (for unxz --stdout; analogous to zcat)

XZ Utils can compress and decompress both the xz and lzma file formats, but since the LZMA format is now legacy, XZ Utils compresses by default to xz.

Both the behavior of the software as well as the properties of the file format have been designed to work similarly to those of the popular Unix compressing tools gzip and bzip2. It consists of a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA-SDK that has been adapted to fit seamlessly into Unix environments and their usual structure and behavior.

Just like gzip and bzip, xz and lzma can only compress single files (or data streams) as input. They cannot bundle multiple files into a single archive – to do this an archiving program is used first, such as tar.

Compressing an archive:

Decompressing the archive:

Version 1.22 or greater of the GNU implementation of tar has transparent support for tarballs compressed with lzma and xz, using the switches --xz or -J for xz compression, and --lzma for LZMA compression.