DESCRIPTION: XZ Utils is free general-purpose data compression software with a high compression ratio.

XZ Utils is free general-purpose data compression software with a high
compression ratio.  XZ Utils were written for POSIX-like systems, but also
work on some not-so-POSIX systems.  XZ Utils are the successor to LZMA
Utils.

The core of the XZ Utils compression code is based on LZMA SDK, but it has
been modified quite a lot to be suitable for XZ Utils.  The primary
compression algorithm is currently LZMA2, which is used inside the .xz
container format.  With typical files, XZ Utils create 30 % smaller output
than gzip and 15 % smaller output than bzip2.

XZ Utils consist of several components:

* liblzma is a compression library with an API similar to that of zlib.
* xz is a command line tool with syntax similar to that of gzip.
* xzdec is a decompression-only tool smaller than the full-featured xz tool.
* A set of shell scripts (xzgrep, xzdiff, etc.) have been adapted from gzip to ease viewing, grepping, and comparing compressed files.
* Emulation of command line tools of LZMA Utils eases transition from LZMA Utils to XZ Utils.

While liblzma has a zlib-like API, liblzma doesn't include any file I/O
functions.  A separate I/O library is planned, which would abstract handling
of .gz, .bz2, and .xz files with an easy to use API.