XZ Utils for Debian =================== Contents: 1. History 2. LZMA Utils compatibility 3. Configuration History ------- XZ Utils should have been called LZMA Utils 4.42, but it came too late. The old .lzma file format has some problems, worst of which is the lack of magic number, but it gets enough use to still need to be supported. See /usr/share/doc/xz-utils/history.txt.gz for the full story. LZMA Utils compatibility ------------------------ To support old scripts and muscle memory, XZ Utils can emulate the legacy LZMA Utils interface. To use this feature, you can install some subset of the following list of symbolic links to your $PATH. lzma, unlzma, lzcat -> /usr/bin/xz lzgrep, lzegrep, lzfgrep -> /usr/bin/xzgrep lzless -> /usr/bin/xzless lzmore -> /usr/bin/xzmore lzdiff, lzcmp -> /usr/bin/xzdiff If you would like XZ Utils to provide these commands by default for all users, use "update-alternatives --config lzma". Configuration ------------- The memory usage of xz can vary from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes depending on the compression settings. If you would like xz to automatically scale down its settings while compressing to decrease memory usage, you can declare so by adding an option like the following to your environment (e.g., in ~/.profile): XZ_DEFAULTS=--memlimit-compress=256MiB export XZ_DEFAULTS See the "Memory usage" section of the xz(1) manual page for details. -- Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> Sun, 27 Jan 2019 15:32:33 -0800