xz is a new general-purpose, command line data compression utility, similar to gzip and bzip2. It can be used to compress or decompress a file according to the selected operation mode. It supports various formats to compress or decompress files.
Selecting a compression utility to use will depend mainly on two factors, the compression speed and rate of a given tool. Unlike its counterparts, xz is not commonly used but offers the best compression.
Learn XZ Command Examples in Linux
The simplest example of compressing a file with xz is as follows, using the -z or --compress option.
$ ls -lh ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso $ xz ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso OR $ xz -z ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
To decompress a file, use the -d option or unxz utility as shown.
$ xz -d ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso OR $ unxz ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
To prevent deleting of the input file(s), use the -k flag as follows,
$ xz -k ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
If an operation fails, for instance a compressed file with same name exists, you can use the -f option to force the process.
$ xz -kf ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
xz also supports different compression preset levels (0 to 9, with default being 6). You can also use aliases such as --fast (but least compression) for 0 or --best for 9 (slow but highest compression). You can specify a compression level as in the examples below.
$ xz -k -8 ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso $ xz -k --best ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
If you have a small amount of system memory, and want to compress a huge file, you can use the –memory=limit option (where limit can be in MBs or as a percentage of RAM) to set a memory usage limit for compression as follows.
$ xz -k --best --memlimit-compress=10% ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
You can run it in quiet mode using the -q option or enable verbose mode with the -v flag as shown.
$ xz -k -q ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso $ xz -k -qv ClearOS-DVD-x86_64.iso
The following is an example of using tar archiving utility with xz utility.
$ tar -cf - *.txt | xz -7 > txtfiles.tar.xz OR $tar -cJf txtfiles.tar.xz *.txt
You can test the integrity of compressed files using the -t option and you can use the -l flag to view information about a compressed file.
$ xz -t txtfiles.tar.xz $ xz -l txtfiles.tar.xz
