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Lzip is a lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm, with
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very safe integrity checking and a user interface similar to the one of
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gzip or bzip2. Lzip decompresses almost as fast as gzip and compresses
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better than bzip2, which makes it well suited for software distribution
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Lziprecover is a data recovery tool for lzip compressed files able to
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repair slightly damaged files, recover badly damaged files from two or
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more copies, and extract undamaged members from multi-member files. If
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the cause of file corruption is damaged media, the combination GNU
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ddrescue + lziprecover is the best option for recovering data from
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multiple damaged copies.
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Lzip replaces every file given in the command line with a compressed
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version of itself, with the name "original_name.lz". Each compressed
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file has the same modification date, permissions, and, when possible,
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ownership as the corresponding original, so that these properties can be
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correctly restored at decompression time. Lzip is able to read from some
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types of non regular files if the "--stdout" option is specified.
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If no file names are specified, lzip compresses (or decompresses) from
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standard input to standard output. In this case, lzip will decline to
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write compressed output to a terminal, as this would be entirely
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incomprehensible and therefore pointless.
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Lzip will correctly decompress a file which is the concatenation of two
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or more compressed files. The result is the concatenation of the
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corresponding uncompressed files. Integrity testing of concatenated
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compressed files is also supported.
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Lzip can produce multimember files and safely recover, with lziprecover,
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the undamaged members in case of file damage. Lzip can also split the
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compressed output in volumes of a given size, even when reading from
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standard input. This allows the direct creation of multivolume
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compressed tar archives.
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Lzip will automatically use the smallest possible dictionary size
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without exceeding the given limit. Keep in mind that the decompression
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memory requirement is affected at compression time by the choice of
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dictionary size limit.
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As a self-check for your protection, lzip stores in the member trailer
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the 32-bit CRC of the original data and the size of the original data,
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to make sure that the decompressed version of the data is identical to
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the original. This guards against corruption of the compressed data, and
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against undetected bugs in lzip (hopefully very unlikely). The chances
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of data corruption going undetected are microscopic, less than one
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chance in 4000 million for each member processed. Be aware, though, that
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the check occurs upon decompression, so it can only tell you that
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something is wrong. It can't help you recover the original uncompressed
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Lzip implements a simplified version of the LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov
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chain-Algorithm) algorithm. The high compression of LZMA comes from
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combining two basic, well-proven compression ideas: sliding dictionaries
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(LZ77/78) and markov models (the thing used by every compression
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algorithm that uses a range encoder or similar order-0 entropy coder as
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its last stage) with segregation of contexts according to what the bits
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The ideas embodied in lzip are due to (at least) the following people:
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Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv (for the LZ algorithm), Andrey Markov (for
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the definition of Markov chains), G.N.N. Martin (for the definition of
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range encoding), Igor Pavlov (for putting all the above together in
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LZMA), and Julian Seward (for bzip2's CLI and the idea of unzcrash).
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Copyright (C) 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Antonio Diaz Diaz.
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This file is free documentation: you have unlimited permission to copy,
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distribute and modify it.
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The file Makefile.in is a data file used by configure to produce the
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Makefile. It has the same copyright owner and permissions that configure