NAME

lizard, unlizard, lizardcat - Compress or decompress .liz files

SYNOPSIS

lizard [OPTIONS] [-|INPUT-FILE] <OUTPUT-FILE>

unlizard is equivalent to lizard -d
lizardcat is equivalent to lizard -dc

When writing scripts that need to decompress files, it is recommended to always use the name lizard with appropriate arguments (lizard -d or lizard -dc) instead of the names unlizard and lizardcat.

DESCRIPTION

lizard is an extremely fast lossless compression algorithm, based on byte-aligned LZ77 family of compression scheme. lizard offers compression speeds of 400 MB/s per core, linearly scalable with multi-core CPUs. It features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core, typically reaching RAM speed limit on multi-core systems. The native file format is the .liz format.

lizard supports a command line syntax similar but not identical to gzip(1). Differences are : lizard preserve original files ; lizard file1 file2 means : compress file1 into file2 ; lizard file shows real-time statistics during compression .

Default behaviors can be modified by opt-in commands, described below. lizard --quiet --multiple more closely mimics gzip behavior.

Concatenation of .liz files

It is possible to concatenate .liz files as is. lizard will decompress such files as if they were a single .liz file. For example: lizard file1 > foo.liz lizard file2 >> foo.liz then lizardcat foo.liz is equivalent to : cat file1 file2

OPTIONS

Short commands concatenation

In some cases, some options can be expressed using short command -x or long command --long-word . Short commands can be concatenated together. For example, -d -c is equivalent to -dc . Long commands cannot be concatenated. They must be clearly separated by a space.

Multiple commands

When multiple contradictory commands are issued on a same command line, only the latest one will be applied.

Operation mode

-z, --compress: Compress. This is the default operation mode when no operation mode option is specified , no other operation mode is implied from the command name (for example, unlizard implies --decompress ), nor from the input file name (for example, a file extension .liz implies --decompress by default). -z can also be used to force compression of an already compressed .liz file.
-d, --decompress, --uncompress: Decompress. --decompress is also the default operation when the input filename has an .liz extensionq
-t, --test: Test the integrity of compressed .liz files. The decompressed data is discarded. No files are created nor removed.

Operation modifiers

-1: fast compression (default)
-9: high compression
-f, --[no-]force: This option has several effects:

If the target file already exists, overwrite it without prompting.
When used with --decompress and lizard cannot recognize the type of the source file, copy the source file as is to standard output. This allows lizardcat --force to be used like cat(1) for files that have not been compressed with lizard.

-c, --stdout, --to-stdout: force write to standard output, even if it is the console
-m, --multiple: Multiple file names. By default, the second filename is used as the destination filename for the compressed file. With -m , you can specify any number of input filenames. Each of them will be compressed independently, and the resulting name of each compressed file will be filename.liz
-B#: block size [4-7](default : 7) B1 = 128KB, B2=256KB, B3=1MB, B4=4MB, B5=16MB, B6=64MB, B7=256MB
-BD: block dependency (improves compression ratio on small blocks)
--[no-]frame-crc: select frame checksum (default:enabled)
--[no-]content-size: header includes original size (default:not present) Note : this option can only be activated when the original size can be determined, hence for a file. It won't work with unknown source size, such as stdin or pipe.
--[no-]sparse: sparse mode support (default:enabled on file, disabled on stdout)
-l: use Legacy format (useful for Linux Kernel compression)

Other options

-v, --verbose: verbose mode
-q, --quiet: suppress warnings and real-time statistics; specify twice to suppress errors too
-h/-H: display help/long help and exit
-V, --version: display Version number and exit
-k, --keep: Don't delete source file. This is default behavior anyway, so this option is just for compatibility with gzip/xz.
-b: benchmark file(s)
-i#: iteration loops [1-9](default : 3), benchmark mode only

BUGS

Report bugs at: https://github.com/inikep/lizard/issues

AUTHOR

Yann Collet