Lzip

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 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.{{citation|surname1=Brian Lindholm|periodical=Linux Gazette|title=New Options in the World of File Compression |issue=162|date= May 2009|language=de|url=http://linuxgazette.net/162/lindholm.html|access-date=2011-01-07}}

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).{{cite web | title=Lzip Manual: Introduction |author=Antonio Diaz Diaz | url=http://lzip.nongnu.org/manual/lzip_manual.html#Introduction | quote=Lzip can produce multimember files and safely recover, with lziprecover, the undamaged members in case of file damage. Lzip can also split the compressed output in volumes of a given size, even when reading from standard input. This allows the direct creation of multivolume compressed tar archives. | date=2011-12-20}} 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;{{cite web | title=Lzip Manual: Introduction |author=Antonio Diaz Diaz | url=http://lzip.nongnu.org/manual/lzip_manual.html#Introduction | quote=As a self-check for your protection, lzip stores in the member trailer the 32-bit CRC of the original data and the size of the original data, to make sure that the decompressed version of the data is identical to the original. | date=2011-12-20}} this is used in combination with the lziprecover program to detect and reconstruct damaged data. This recovery tool can merge multiple copies of an archive where each copy may have damage in a different part of the file.

lzip has two parallel interfaces provided in the default distribution.{{cite web |title=The lzip format |url=https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_talk_ghm_2019.html |website=www.nongnu.org}}

• {{code|plzip}} compresses any file in a parallel way. Using it with {{code|tar}} is insufficient, since the conventional {{code|tar}} program needs the entire stream before a file to locate it for decompression, resulting in non-parallel extraction.
• {{code|tarlz}} combines {{code|tar}} and {{code|lzip}} into a parallel archiver much like modern archivers like RAR or 7-Zip. The solid compression blocks align with {{code|tar}} file boundaries, so extracting a file only requires decompressing that particular member block.

In popular Linux distributions, lzip can usually be installed from official package repositories.{{Cite web|url=https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=lzip|title=Debian -- Package Search Results -- lzip|website=packages.debian.org}}{{cite web |url=https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/lzip |title=Fedora Package Database -- lzip |access-date=2011-01-08 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717001033/https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/lzip |archive-date=2011-07-17 }}{{Cite web|url=https://software.opensuse.org/search?q=lzip|title=Search|website=software.opensuse.org}}

Cygwin offers lzip as a maintained optional package (Archive category of its setup installer), and its GNU tar utility program has support for .lz archives (with --lzip option for creation). MinGW-w64 distributes lzip through a maintained package in MSYS2 (pacman -S lzip).

• The GNU Autotools support lzip. Adding dist-lzip to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE will build lzip-ed tarballs.{{Cite web|url=https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/List-of-Automake-options.html|title=List of Automake options (automake)|website=www.gnu.org}}
• Versions 1.23 and newer of GNU tar support using lzip to handle compressed files transparently.{{Cite web|url=http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/gzip.html|title=GNU tar 1.32: 8.1.1 Creating and Reading Compressed Archives|website=www.gnu.org}}
• GNOME's archiving tool, Archive Manager, supports lzip files.

• The Linux distribution Dragora GNU/Linux-Libre employs lzip for its software packages.
• Lzip is used to distribute the Time Zone Database from IANA,{{Cite web|url=https://www.iana.org/time-zones|title=IANA — Time Zone Database|website=www.iana.org}} and the GNU version of the Linux kernel.{{Cite web|url=http://www.linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/releases/6.8.4-gnu/|title=Index of /gnu/linux-libre/4.x/4.12-gnu|website=ftp.gnu.org}}
• The European Parliament publishes complete dumps of its database in JSON format compressed with lzip.{{Cite web|url=https://parltrack.org/dumps|title=Dumps | [ParlTrack]|website=parltrack.org}}
• Lzip is used in NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS).{{Cite web|url=https://pds.nasa.gov/datastandards/documents/dd/common/current/ch03s133.html|title=NASA PDS|website=pds.nasa.gov}}

{{Portal|Free and open-source software}}

• Data recovery
• Lossless data compression

{{Reflist}}

• {{Official website}}
• [https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#File-format Lzip format specification]
• [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-diaz-lzip Lzip format specification at IETF]

{{Archive formats}}

Category:Free data compression software