LZMA is a general purporse compression algorithm designed by Igor Pavlov as part of 7-Zip. It provides high compression ratio while keeping the decompression speed fast. XZ Utils are an attempt to make LZMA compression easy to use on free (as in freedom) operating systems. This is achieved by providing tools and libraries which are similar to use than the equivalents of the most popular existing compression algorithms. XZ Utils consist of a few relatively separate parts: * liblzma is an encoder/decoder library with support for several filters (algorithm implementations). The primary filter is LZMA. * libzfile (or whatever the name will be) enables reading from and writing to gzip, bzip2 and LZMA compressed and uncompressed files with an API similar to the standard ANSI-C file I/O. [ NOTE: libzfile is not implemented yet. ] * xz command line tool has almost identical syntax than gzip and bzip2. It makes LZMA easy for average users, but also provides advanced options to finetune the compression settings. * A few shell scripts make diffing and grepping LZMA compressed files easy. The scripts were adapted from gzip and bzip2. Due to backdoor in 5.6.*, this package is currently called 5.6* but contains 5.4.*.