Archiving

Compressor xz

Compression levels

• -0.. -3: -0 sometimes works faster than gzip, but compresses much better;
• -4.. -6: good to very good compression while maintaining reasonable decompressor memory usage;
• -7.. -9: similar to -6, but with higher compressor and decompressor memory requirements.

Environment variables

• XZ_OPT: Options for the current command.

Examples

Compress file to xz format:

xz filename

Compress the file without deleting the original (option -k):

xz -k filename

Unpack xz file (option -d, –decompress, –uncompress):

xz -d filename.xz

More information (optional -v):

xz -v -d filename.xz

Unpack the file and write to standard output (option -c):

xz -dc filename.xz

Compress the file using the fastest compression (option -0):

xz -0 filename

Compress file using better compression (option -9):

xz -9 filename

Specify the number of working threads used (if selected, 0the number of threads is calculated automatically) (option -T0):

xz -v -T0 -9 filename

Compress the entire directory:

tar -cf - dir1 | xz -9ze -T0 >dir1.txz

Using tarwith xzto compress an entire directory:

tar -cJvf archive.tar.xz dir1

Compressor zstd

Repository: https://github.com/facebook/zstd Website: https://facebook.github.io/zstd/

tar

Examples

Specifying parameters for compression (option -I, –use-compress-program):

tar --use-compress-program='xz -9 -T0' cvf archive.tar.xz directory

Specifying options for compression using environment variables: xz, XZ_OPT: options for the current command:

XZ_OPT="-9 -T0" tar cJvf archive.tar.xz directory

xz, XZ_DEFAULTS: global options:

export XZ_DEFAULTS="-9 -T0"
tar cJvf archive.tar.xz directory