Clzip

Clzip is a completely free, open source and lossless data compressor software based on the LZMA (Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm) algorithm, with very safe integrity checking and a user interface similar to the one of the bzip2 or gzip applications. It’s a command-line program implemented in C.

A clean implementation of the LZMA algorithm

The software is a clean implementation of the LZMA algorithm, designed to decompress files almost as fast as gzip, and it is able to compress files better than bzip2, which makes it well suited for data archiving and software distribution.

By using the lzip file format, Clzip produces files fully compatible with lzip-1.4 or newer. It is also known as the C language version of lzip, intended for systems or embedded devices that lack a C++ compiler.

Command-line options

Various command-line options are implemented in Clzip that allow you to use its functionality. They can be viewed at a glance by running the clzip --help’ command in any terminal emulator application.

Among these, we can mention the ability to set member size limit in bytes, to send output to standard output, to decompress, to overwrite existing output files, to force recompression of compressed files, to keep input files, as well as to to set match length limit in bytes.

Getting started with Clzip

To install and use the Clzip program on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to download the latest version of the program from Softoware, save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/clzip-1.6).

Run the ./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the software. After a successful compilation, run the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user to install it system wide and make it available to all users.

What is new in this release:

• Copying of file dates, permissions, and ownership now behaves like "cp -p". (If the user ID or the group ID can't be duplicated, the file permission bits S_ISUID and S_ISGID are cleared).
• "clzip.texinfo" has been renamed to "clzip.texi".

What is new in version 1.5:

• Clzip now shows the progress of compression at verbosity level 2 (-vv).
• Decompressing and testing no more show file version.
• Option "-n, --threads" is now accepted and ignored for compatibility with plzip.
• The configure script now accepts options with a separate argument.

What is new in version 1.5 RC1:

• Decompressing and testing no longer show the file version.
• Minor fixes have been made.

What is new in version 1.5 Pre1:

• Decompression time has been reduced by 1%.
• The file version is now shown only if verbosity >= 4.
• The option "-n, --threads" is now accepted and ignored for compatibility with plzip.
• "configure" now accepts options with a separate argument.

What is new in version 1.4:

• Compression ratio has been slightly increased.
• Compression time has been reduced by 10%.
• Decompression time has been reduced by 8%.
• The targets "install-as-lzip" and "install-bin" have been added to the Makefile.

What is new in version 1.4 RC2:

• Compression ratio has been slightly increased.
• Compression time has been reduced by 10%.
• Decompression time has been reduced by 8%.

What is new in version 1.3 RC1:

• The inability to change output file attributes has been downgraded from an error to a warning.
• A small change has been made in the "--help" output and man page.
• Quote characters in messages have been changed as advised by GNU Coding Standards.

What is new in version 1.2 RC1:

• For large values of "--match-length", compression ratio has been slightly increased and compression time has been reduced by up to 6%.
• The option "-F, --recompress" was added, which forces recompression of files whose names already have the ".lz" or ".tlz" suffix.
• Clzip now prints only one status line for each multimember file when only one "-v" is specified.

What is new in version 1.1:

• The code has been converted to "C89 + long long".
• A C99 compiler is no longer needed.
• A warning about fchown's return value being ignored has been fixed.
• "clzip -tvvvv" now also shows file compression ratio.
• Match length limits set by the options -1 to -9 have been changed to match those of lzip 1.11.
• The message "and `--stdout' was not specified" is not shown for file types that can't be read (directories, etc.).
• Some new examples have been added to the manual.