tukaani-project/xz

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1639 stars · 259 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

XZ Utils is a complete C99 implementation of the .xz file format, consisting of the liblzma compression library (with a zlib-like API) and command-line tools such as xz, xzdec, xzgrep, and xzdiff. It uses LZMA2 as its primary filter, supports filter chaining and multithreaded compression, and typically achieves about 30% smaller files than gzip.

Use cases

• compress files with better ratio than gzip
• decompress .xz archives from the command line
• embed a zlib-like compression API in a C application
• compress software packages for distribution
• compress executable files with BCJ filters
• grep or diff compressed files without manual decompression

When to choose

• you need high compression ratios with fast decompression
• you distribute files that will be decompressed many times
• you want a zlib-style C API for the .xz format
• you need a standard, widely available compression tool on POSIX systems

When to avoid

• you need multithreaded decompression (not yet supported)
• you need extremely fast compression where gzip or zstd is sufficient
• you need very low RAM usage at maximum compression settings
• you need cross-language bindings beyond C without extra work

Facets

library · maturity stable

compression cli file-system developer-tools files windows cross-platform cli c lzma xz-format liblzma data-compression c99 command-line linux macos

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