Lzip

lzip

Original author(s)	Antonio Diaz Diaz
Developer(s)	Antonio Diaz Diaz
Initial release	2008 (2008)
Stable release	1.17 / 24 July 2015 (2015-07-24)
Preview release	1.18-pre1 / 13 August 2015 (2015-08-13)
Written in	C++
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows
License	GPL (Free software)
Website	lzip.nongnu.org/lzip.html

lzip

Filename extension	.lz
Internet media type	application/x-lzip
Magic number	0x4C, 0x5A, 0x49, 0x50
Developed by	Antonio Diaz Diaz
Type of format	Data compression
Open format?	Yes

lzip is a free, 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 MIME type application/x-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).

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.

The recovery tool can merge multiple copies of an archive where each copy may have damage in a different part of the file.

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 proper container format 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.

Adoption

The Linux distribution Dragora GNU/Linux-Libre employs lzip for its software packages.

In popular Linux distributions, lzip can usually be installed from official package repositories.

GNOME's archiving tool, Archive Manager, supports lzip files.

The GNU Autotools support lzip. Adding dist-lzip to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE will build lzip-ed tarballs.

The lzip suite of programs is directly competing with XZ Utils.

See also

• Lossless data compression
• Comparison of archive repair programs

External links

• Official website
• Lzip format specification