Lunzip

Lunzip is an open source, simple, fast and totally free command-line software implemented in C and designed from the offset to help users easily and quickly decompress lzip compressed archives on their GNU/Linux operating systems.

It is a CLI tool tailored specifically for software installers or embedded devices that need to decompress lzip files, but don't need compression functionality. The program can be safely used in scripts and pipes, as it includes the same well-defined exit status values used by the bzip2 and lzip projects.

What is lzip?

The lzip compression algorithm is a clean format, known to be used for archiving data for very long periods of time. It provides very safe 4-factor integrity checking, and it's backed by the lziprecover recovery software.

Getting started with Lunzip

To install and use the Lunzip software on your GNU/Linux machine, you must download the latest version from Softoware or via its official website (see link below), save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents and open a terminal emulator.

In the Linux Terminal window, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softoware/lunzip-1.6) and execute the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program.

Install it system wide by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user on the terminal emulator. To view its command-line options, type the ‘lunzip --help’ command.

Command-line options

Among its command-line options, we can mention the ability to decompress specified archive, overwrite existing files, keep input files, send output to standard output, test the integrity of compressed files, set the output buffer size in bytes, enable verbose mode (two modes are available), as well as to place the output into a specific file when reading stdin.

What is new in this release:

• Minor optimizations.

What is new in version 1.5 RC1:

• The new option "-u, --buffer-size", which activates a "low memory" decompression mode able to decompress any file using as little memory as 50 kB, irrespective of the dictionary size used to compress the file, has been added.
• File date, permissions, and ownership are now copied like "cp -p" does.
• This version is portable to very old hardware.
• It has been compiled and tested on a laptop with a 486 processor and 4MiB of RAM.

What is new in version 1.4:

• The file version is no longer shown in status messages.
• Minor fixes have been made.

What is new in version 1.4 RC1:

• File version is no longer shown in status messages. There are minor fixes.

What is new in version 1.3:

• 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.
• The "configure" script now accepts options with a separate argument.

What is new in version 1.2:

• Decompression time has been reduced by 12%.
• Makefile.in: Added new target 'install-as-lzip'.
• Makefile.in: Added new target 'install-bin'.
• main.c: Use 'setmode' instead of '_setmode' on Windows and OS/2.