webinstall.dev/xz Star on GitHub

To update or switch versions, run webi xz@stable (or @v5.2, @beta, etc).

Files

These are the files / directories that are created and/or modified with this install:

~/.config/envman/PATH.env
~/.local/bin/unxz
~/.local/bin/xz

Cheat Sheet

xz and unxz are modern alternatives to gzip (and gunzip). They use LZMA2 (de)compression (like 7z), and is supported across many platforms, and by tar.

Here's the shortlist of options we've found most useful:

-z, --compress      force compression
-d, --decompress    force decompression
-l, --list          list information about .xz files

-k, --keep          keep (don't delete) input files
-c, --stdout        write to standard output and don't delete input files

-0 ... -9           (de)compression can take up to 4gb RAM at 7-9 (default 6)
-e, --extreme       try to improve compression ratio by using more CPU time
-T, --threads=N     use up to N threads; set to 0 to match CPU cores (default 1)

How to "Unzip"

unxz -k example.xz

tar xvf example.tar.xz

How to "Zip"

xz -k ./example

tar cvf example.tar.xz ./example