Lzip is a lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm, with very safe integrity checking and a user interface similar to the one of gzip or bzip2.

Lzip compresses better than bzip2 and decompresses almost as fast as gzip, which makes it well suited for software distribution and data archiving.

Lzip replaces every file given in the command line with a compressed version of itself, with the name "original_name.lz". Each compressed file has the same modification date, permissions, and, when possible, ownership as the corresponding original, so that these properties can be correctly restored at decompression time.

Lzip is able to read from some types of non regular files if the "--stdout" option is specified.

If no file names are specified, lzip compresses (or decompresses) from standard input to standard output. In this case, lzip will decline to write compressed output to a terminal, as this would be entirely incomprehensible and therefore pointless.

Lzip will correctly decompress a file which is the concatenation of two or more compressed files. The result is the concatenation of the corresponding uncompressed files. Integrity testing of concatenated compressed files is also supported.

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.

Lzip will automatically use the smallest possible dictionary size for each member without exceeding the given limit. It is important to appreciate that the decompression memory requirement is affected at compression time by the choice of dictionary size limit.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Lzip now returns at least 1 if closing stdout fails.
· Lintian warnings in Debian about man pages have been fixed.
· The "COPYING" file is no more used for decompression test.