1 LZMA is a general purporse compression algorithm designed by Igor
2 Pavlov as part of 7-Zip. It provides high compression ratio while
3 keeping the decompression speed fast.
5 XZ Utils are an attempt to make LZMA compression easy to use on
6 free (as in freedom) operating systems. This is achieved by providing
7 tools and libraries which are similar to use than the equivalents
8 of the most popular existing compression algorithms.
10 XZ Utils consist of a few relatively separate parts:
11 * liblzma is an encoder/decoder library with support for several
12 filters (algorithm implementations). The primary filter is
14 * libzfile (or whatever the name will be) enables reading from
15 and writing to gzip, bzip2 and LZMA compressed and uncompressed
16 files with an API similar to the standard ANSI-C file I/O.
17 [ NOTE: libzfile is not implemented yet. ]
18 * xz command line tool has almost identical syntax than gzip
19 and bzip2. It makes LZMA easy for average users, but also
20 provides advanced options to finetune the compression settings.
21 * A few shell scripts make diffing and grepping LZMA compressed
22 files easy. The scripts were adapted from gzip and bzip2.