unxz is equivalent to xz --decompress.
xzcat is equivalent to xz --decompress --stdout.
lzma is equivalent to xz --format=lzma.
unlzma is equivalent to xz --format=lzma --decompress.
lzcat is equivalent to xz --format=lzma --decompress --stdout.

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

Integer suffixes and special values

In most places where an integer argument is expected, an optional suffix is supported to easily indicate large integers. There must be no space between the integer and the suffix.

KiB

Multiply the integer by 1,024 (2^10). Ki, k, kB, K, and KB are accepted as synonyms for KiB.

MiB

Multiply the integer by 1,048,576 (2^20). Mi, m, M, and MB are accepted as synonyms for MiB.

GiB

Multiply the integer by 1,073,741,824 (2^30). Gi, g, G, and GB are accepted as synonyms for GiB.

The special value max can be used to indicate the maximum integer value supported by the option.

Operation mode

If multiple operation mode options are given, the last one takes effect.

-z, --compress

Compress. This is the default operation mode when no operation mode option is specified and no other operation mode is implied from the command name (for example, unxz implies --decompress).

-d, --decompress, --uncompress

Decompress.

-t, --test

Test the integrity of compressed files. This option is equivalent to --decompress --stdout except that the decompressed data is discarded instead of being written to standard output. No files are created or removed.

-l, --list

Print information about compressed files. No uncompressed output is produced, and no files are created or removed. In list mode, the program cannot read the compressed data from standard input or from other unseekable sources.

The default listing shows basic information about files, one file per line. To get more detailed information, use also the --verbose option. For even more information, use --verbose twice, but note that this may be slow, because getting all the extra information requires many seeks. The width of verbose output exceeds 80 characters, so piping the output to, for example, less -S may be convenient if the terminal isn't wide enough.

The exact output may vary between xz versions and different locales. For machine-readable output, --robot --list should be used.

Operation modifiers

-k, --keep

Don't delete the input files.

Since xz 5.2.6, this option also makes xz compress or decompress even if the input is a symbolic link to a regular file, has more than one hard link, or has the setuid, setgid, or sticky bit set. The setuid, setgid, and sticky bits are not copied to the target file. In earlier versions this was only done with --force.

-f, --force

This option has several effects:

• If the target file already exists, delete it before compressing or decompressing.

• Compress or decompress even if the input is a symbolic link to a regular file, has more than one hard link, or has the setuid, setgid, or sticky bit set. The setuid, setgid, and sticky bits are not copied to the target file.

• When used with --decompress --stdout and xz cannot recognize the type of the source file, copy the source file as is to standard output. This allows xzcat --force to be used like cat(1) for files that have not been compressed with xz. Note that in future, xz might support new compressed file formats, which may make xz decompress more types of files instead of copying them as is to standard output. --format=format can be used to restrict xz to decompress only a single file format.

-c, --stdout, --to-stdout

Write the compressed or decompressed data to standard output instead of a file. This implies --keep.

--single-stream

Decompress only the first .xz stream, and silently ignore possible remaining input data following the stream. Normally such trailing garbage makes xz display an error.

xz never decompresses more than one stream from .lzma files or raw streams, but this option still makes xz ignore the possible trailing data after the .lzma file or raw stream.

This option has no effect if the operation mode is not --decompress or --test.

--no-sparse

Disable creation of sparse files. By default, if decompressing into a regular file, xz tries to make the file sparse if the decompressed data contains long sequences of binary zeros. It also works when writing to standard output as long as standard output is connected to a regular file and certain additional conditions are met to make it safe. Creating sparse files may save disk space and speed up the decompression by reducing the amount of disk I/O.

-S .suf, --suffix=.suf

When compressing, use .suf as the suffix for the target file instead of .xz or .lzma. If not writing to standard output and the source file already has the suffix .suf, a warning is displayed and the file is skipped.

When decompressing, recognize files with the suffix .suf in addition to files with the .xz, .txz, .lzma, .tlz, or .lz suffix. If the source file has the suffix .suf, the suffix is removed to get the target filename.

When compressing or decompressing raw streams (--format=raw), the suffix must always be specified unless writing to standard output, because there is no default suffix for raw streams.

--files[=file]

Read the filenames to process from file; if file is omitted, filenames are read from standard input. Filenames must be terminated with the newline character. A dash (-) is taken as a regular filename; it doesn't mean standard input. If filenames are given also as command line arguments, they are processed before the filenames read from file.

--files0[=file]

This is identical to --files[=file] except that each filename must be terminated with the null character.

Basic file format and compression options

-F format, --format=format

Specify the file format to compress or decompress:

auto

This is the default. When compressing, auto is equivalent to xz. When decompressing, the format of the input file is automatically detected. Note that raw streams (created with --format=raw) cannot be auto-detected.

xz

Compress to the .xz file format, or accept only .xz files when decompressing.

lzma, alone

Compress to the legacy .lzma file format, or accept only .lzma files when decompressing. The alternative name alone is provided for backwards compatibility with LZMA Utils.

lzip

Accept only .lz files when decompressing. Compression is not supported.

The .lz format version 0 and the unextended version 1 are supported. Version 0 files were produced by lzip 1.3 and older. Such files aren't common but may be found from file archives as a few source packages were released in this format. People might have old personal files in this format too. Decompression support for the format version 0 was removed in lzip 1.18.

lzip 1.4 and later create files in the format version 1. The sync flush marker extension to the format version 1 was added in lzip 1.6. This extension is rarely used and isn't supported by xz (diagnosed as corrupt input).

raw

Compress or uncompress a raw stream (no headers). This is meant for advanced users only. To decode raw streams, you need use --format=raw and explicitly specify the filter chain, which normally would have been stored in the container headers.

-C check, --check=check

Specify the type of the integrity check. The check is calculated from the uncompressed data and stored in the .xz file. This option has an effect only when compressing into the .xz format; the .lzma format doesn't support integrity checks. The integrity check (if any) is verified when the .xz file is decompressed.

Supported check types:

none

Don't calculate an integrity check at all. This is usually a bad idea. This can be useful when integrity of the data is verified by other means anyway.

crc32

Calculate CRC32 using the polynomial from IEEE-802.3 (Ethernet).

crc64

Calculate CRC64 using the polynomial from ECMA-182. This is the default, since it is slightly better than CRC32 at detecting damaged files and the speed difference is negligible.

sha256

Calculate SHA-256. This is somewhat slower than CRC32 and CRC64.

Integrity of the .xz headers is always verified with CRC32. It is not possible to change or disable it.

--ignore-check

Don't verify the integrity check of the compressed data when decompressing. The CRC32 values in the .xz headers will still be verified normally.

Do not use this option unless you know what you are doing. Possible reasons to use this option:

• Trying to recover data from a corrupt .xz file.

• Speeding up decompression. This matters mostly with SHA-256 or with files that have compressed extremely well. It's recommended to not use this option for this purpose unless the file integrity is verified externally in some other way.

-0 ... -9

Select a compression preset level. The default is -6. If multiple preset levels are specified, the last one takes effect. If a custom filter chain was already specified, setting a compression preset level clears the custom filter chain.

The differences between the presets are more significant than with gzip(1) and bzip2(1). The selected compression settings determine the memory requirements of the decompressor, thus using a too high preset level might make it painful to decompress the file on an old system with little RAM. Specifically, it's not a good idea to blindly use -9 for everything like it often is with gzip(1) and bzip2(1).

-0 ... -3

These are somewhat fast presets. -0 is sometimes faster than gzip -9 while compressing much better. The higher ones often have speed comparable to bzip2(1) with comparable or better compression ratio, although the results depend a lot on the type of data being compressed.

-4 ... -6

Good to very good compression while keeping decompressor memory usage reasonable even for old systems. -6 is the default, which is usually a good choice for distributing files that need to be decompressible even on systems with only 16 MiB RAM. (-5e or -6e may be worth considering too. See --extreme.)

-7 ... -9

These are like -6 but with higher compressor and decompressor memory requirements. These are useful only when compressing files bigger than 8 MiB, 16 MiB, and 32 MiB, respectively.

On the same hardware, the decompression speed is approximately a constant number of bytes of compressed data per second. In other words, the better the compression, the faster the decompression will usually be. This also means that the amount of uncompressed output produced per second can vary a lot.

The following table summarises the features of the presets:

Preset	DictSize	CompCPU	CompMem	DecMem
-0	256 KiB	0	3 MiB	1 MiB
-1	1 MiB	1	9 MiB	2 MiB
-2	2 MiB	2	17 MiB	3 MiB
-3	4 MiB	3	32 MiB	5 MiB
-4	4 MiB	4	48 MiB	5 MiB
-5	8 MiB	5	94 MiB	9 MiB
-6	8 MiB	6	94 MiB	9 MiB
-7	16 MiB	6	186 MiB	17 MiB
-8	32 MiB	6	370 MiB	33 MiB
-9	64 MiB	6	674 MiB	65 MiB

Column descriptions:

• DictSize is the LZMA2 dictionary size. It is waste of memory to use a dictionary bigger than the size of the uncompressed file. This is why it is good to avoid using the presets -7 ... -9 when there's no real need for them. At -6 and lower, the amount of memory wasted is usually low enough to not matter.

• CompCPU is a simplified representation of the LZMA2 settings that affect compression speed. The dictionary size affects speed too, so while CompCPU is the same for levels -6 ... -9, higher levels still tend to be a little slower. To get even slower and thus possibly better compression, see --extreme.

• CompMem contains the compressor memory requirements in the single-threaded mode. It may vary slightly between xz versions. Memory requirements of some of the future multithreaded modes may be dramatically higher than that of the single-threaded mode.

• DecMem contains the decompressor memory requirements. That is, the compression settings determine the memory requirements of the decompressor. The exact decompressor memory usage is slightly more than the LZMA2 dictionary size, but the values in the table have been rounded up to the next full MiB.

-e, --extreme

Use a slower variant of the selected compression preset level (-0 ... -9) to hopefully get a little bit better compression ratio, but with bad luck this can also make it worse. Decompressor memory usage is not affected, but compressor memory usage increases a little at preset levels -0 ... -3.

Since there are two presets with dictionary sizes 4 MiB and 8 MiB, the presets -3e and -5e use slightly faster settings (lower CompCPU) than -4e and -6e, respectively. That way no two presets are identical.

Preset	DictSize	CompCPU	CompMem	DecMem
-0e	256 KiB	8	4 MiB	1 MiB
-1e	1 MiB	8	13 MiB	2 MiB
-2e	2 MiB	8	25 MiB	3 MiB
-3e	4 MiB	7	48 MiB	5 MiB
-4e	4 MiB	8	48 MiB	5 MiB
-5e	8 MiB	7	94 MiB	9 MiB
-6e	8 MiB	8	94 MiB	9 MiB
-7e	16 MiB	8	186 MiB	17 MiB
-8e	32 MiB	8	370 MiB	33 MiB
-9e	64 MiB	8	674 MiB	65 MiB

For example, there are a total of four presets that use 8 MiB dictionary, whose order from the fastest to the slowest is -5, -6, -5e, and -6e.

--fast

--best

These are somewhat misleading aliases for -0 and -9, respectively. These are provided only for backwards compatibility with LZMA Utils. Avoid using these options.

--block-size=size

When compressing to the .xz format, split the input data into blocks of size bytes. The blocks are compressed independently from each other, which helps with multi-threading and makes limited random-access decompression possible. This option is typically used to override the default block size in multi-threaded mode, but this option can be used in single-threaded mode too.

In multi-threaded mode about three times size bytes will be allocated in each thread for buffering input and output. The default size is three times the LZMA2 dictionary size or 1 MiB, whichever is more. Typically a good value is 2–4 times the size of the LZMA2 dictionary or at least 1 MiB. Using size less than the LZMA2 dictionary size is waste of RAM because then the LZMA2 dictionary buffer will never get fully used. The sizes of the blocks are stored in the block headers, which a future version of xz will use for multi-threaded decompression.

In single-threaded mode no block splitting is done by default. Setting this option doesn't affect memory usage. No size information is stored in block headers, thus files created in single-threaded mode won't be identical to files created in multi-threaded mode. The lack of size information also means that a future version of xz won't be able decompress the files in multi-threaded mode.

--block-list=sizes

When compressing to the .xz format, start a new block after the given intervals of uncompressed data.

The uncompressed sizes of the blocks are specified as a comma-separated list. Omitting a size (two or more consecutive commas) is a shorthand to use the size of the previous block.

If the input file is bigger than the sum of sizes, the last value in sizes is repeated until the end of the file. A special value of 0 may be used as the last value to indicate that the rest of the file should be encoded as a single block.

If one specifies sizes that exceed the encoder's block size (either the default value in threaded mode or the value specified with --block-size=size), the encoder will create additional blocks while keeping the boundaries specified in sizes. For example, if one specifies --block-size=10MiB --block-list=5MiB,10MiB,8MiB,12MiB,24MiB and the input file is 80 MiB, one will get 11 blocks: 5, 10, 8, 10, 2, 10, 10, 4, 10, 10, and 1 MiB.

In multi-threaded mode the sizes of the blocks are stored in the block headers. This isn't done in single-threaded mode, so the encoded output won't be identical to that of the multi-threaded mode.

--flush-timeout=timeout

When compressing, if more than timeout milliseconds (a positive integer) has passed since the previous flush and reading more input would block, all the pending input data is flushed from the encoder and made available in the output stream. This can be useful if xz is used to compress data that is streamed over a network. Small timeout values make the data available at the receiving end with a small delay, but large timeout values give better compression ratio.

This feature is disabled by default. If this option is specified more than once, the last one takes effect. The special timeout value of 0 can be used to explicitly disable this feature.

This feature is not available on non-POSIX systems.

This feature is still experimental. Currently xz is unsuitable for decompressing the stream in real time due to how xz does buffering.

--memlimit-compress=limit

Set a memory usage limit for compression. If this option is specified multiple times, the last one takes effect.

If the compression settings exceed the limit, xz will attempt to adjust the settings downwards so that the limit is no longer exceeded and display a notice that automatic adjustment was done. The adjustments are done in this order: reducing the number of threads, switching to single-threaded mode if even one thread in multi-threaded mode exceeds the limit, and finally reducing the LZMA2 dictionary size.

When compressing with --format=raw or if --no-adjust has been specified, only the number of threads may be reduced since it can be done without affecting the compressed output.

If the limit cannot be met even with the adjustments described above, an error is displayed and xz will exit with exit status 1.

The limit can be specified in multiple ways:

• The limit can be an absolute value in bytes. Using an integer suffix like MiB can be useful. Example: --memlimit-compress=80MiB

• The limit can be specified as a percentage of total physical memory (RAM). This can be useful especially when setting the XZ_DEFAULTS environment variable in a shell initialization script that is shared between different computers. That way the limit is automatically bigger on systems with more memory. Example: --memlimit-compress=70%

• The limit can be reset back to its default value by setting it to 0. This is currently equivalent to setting the limit to max (no memory usage limit).

For 32-bit xz there is a special case: if the limit would be over 4020 MiB, the limit is set to 4020 MiB. On MIPS32 2000 MiB is used instead. (The values 0 and max aren't affected by this. A similar feature doesn't exist for decompression.) This can be helpful when a 32-bit executable has access to 4 GiB address space (2 GiB on MIPS32) while hopefully doing no harm in other situations.

See also the section Memory usage.

--memlimit-decompress=limit

Set a memory usage limit for decompression. This also affects the --list mode. If the operation is not possible without exceeding the limit, xz will display an error and decompressing the file will fail. See --memlimit-compress=limit for possible ways to specify the limit.

--memlimit-mt-decompress=limit

Set a memory usage limit for multi-threaded decompression. This can only affect the number of threads; this will never make xz refuse to decompress a file. If limit is too low to allow any multi-threading, the limit is ignored and xz will continue in single-threaded mode. Note that if also --memlimit-decompress is used, it will always apply to both single-threaded and multi-threaded modes, and so the effective limit for multi-threading will never be higher than the limit set with --memlimit-decompress.

In contrast to the other memory usage limit options, --memlimit-mt-decompress=limit has a system-specific default limit. xz --info-memory can be used to see the current value.

This option and its default value exist because without any limit the threaded decompressor could end up allocating an insane amount of memory with some input files. If the default limit is too low on your system, feel free to increase the limit but never set it to a value larger than the amount of usable RAM as with appropriate input files xz will attempt to use that amount of memory even with a low number of threads. Running out of memory or swapping will not improve decompression performance.

See --memlimit-compress=limit for possible ways to specify the limit. Setting limit to 0 resets the limit to the default system-specific value.

-M limit, --memlimit=limit, --memory=limit

This is equivalent to specifying --memlimit-compress=limit --memlimit-decompress=limit --memlimit-mt-decompress=limit.

--no-adjust

Display an error and exit if the memory usage limit cannot be met without adjusting settings that affect the compressed output. That is, this prevents xz from switching the encoder from multi-threaded mode to single-threaded mode and from reducing the LZMA2 dictionary size. Even when this option is used the number of threads may be reduced to meet the memory usage limit as that won't affect the compressed output.

Automatic adjusting is always disabled when creating raw streams (--format=raw).

-T threads, --threads=threads

Specify the number of worker threads to use. Setting threads to a special value 0 makes xz use up to as many threads as the processor(s) on the system support. The actual number of threads can be fewer than threads if the input file is not big enough for threading with the given settings or if using more threads would exceed the memory usage limit.

The single-threaded and multi-threaded compressors produce different output. Single-threaded compressor will give the smallest file size but only the output from the multi-threaded compressor can be decompressed using multiple threads. Setting threads to 1 will use the single-threaded mode. Setting threads to any other value, including 0, will use the multi-threaded compressor even if the system supports only one hardware thread. (xz 5.2.x used single-threaded mode in this situation.)

To use multi-threaded mode with only one thread, set threads to +1. The + prefix has no effect with values other than 1. A memory usage limit can still make xz switch to single-threaded mode unless --no-adjust is used. Support for the + prefix was added in xz 5.4.0.

If an automatic number of threads has been requested and no memory usage limit has been specified, then a system-specific default soft limit will be used to possibly limit the number of threads. It is a soft limit in sense that it is ignored if the number of threads becomes one, thus a soft limit will never stop xz from compressing or decompressing. This default soft limit will not make xz switch from multi-threaded mode to single-threaded mode. The active limits can be seen with xz --info-memory.

Currently the only threading method is to split the input into blocks and compress them independently from each other. The default block size depends on the compression level and can be overridden with the --block-size=size option.

Threaded decompression only works on files that contain multiple blocks with size information in block headers. All large enough files compressed in multi-threaded mode meet this condition, but files compressed in single-threaded mode don't even if --block-size=size has been used.

Custom compressor filter chains

A custom filter chain allows specifying the compression settings in detail instead of relying on the settings associated to the presets. When a custom filter chain is specified, preset options (-0 ... -9 and --extreme) earlier on the command line are forgotten. If a preset option is specified after one or more custom filter chain options, the new preset takes effect and the custom filter chain options specified earlier are forgotten.

A filter chain is comparable to piping on the command line. When compressing, the uncompressed input goes to the first filter, whose output goes to the next filter (if any). The output of the last filter gets written to the compressed file. The maximum number of filters in the chain is four, but typically a filter chain has only one or two filters.

Many filters have limitations on where they can be in the filter chain: some filters can work only as the last filter in the chain, some only as a non-last filter, and some work in any position in the chain. Depending on the filter, this limitation is either inherent to the filter design or exists to prevent security issues.

A custom filter chain is specified by using one or more filter options in the order they are wanted in the filter chain. That is, the order of filter options is significant! When decoding raw streams (--format=raw), the filter chain is specified in the same order as it was specified when compressing.

Filters take filter-specific options as a comma-separated list. Extra commas in options are ignored. Every option has a default value, so you need to specify only those you want to change.

To see the whole filter chain and options, use xz -vv (that is, use --verbose twice). This works also for viewing the filter chain options used by presets.

--lzma1[=options]

--lzma2[=options]

Add LZMA1 or LZMA2 filter to the filter chain. These filters can be used only as the last filter in the chain.

LZMA1 is a legacy filter, which is supported almost solely due to the legacy .lzma file format, which supports only LZMA1. LZMA2 is an updated version of LZMA1 to fix some practical issues of LZMA1. The .xz format uses LZMA2 and doesn't support LZMA1 at all. Compression speed and ratios of LZMA1 and LZMA2 are practically the same.

LZMA1 and LZMA2 share the same set of options:

preset=preset

Reset all LZMA1 or LZMA2 options to preset. Preset consist of an integer, which may be followed by single-letter preset modifiers. The integer can be from 0 to 9, matching the command line options -0 ... -9. The only supported modifier is currently e, which matches --extreme. If no preset is specified, the default values of LZMA1 or LZMA2 options are taken from the preset 6.

dict=size

Dictionary (history buffer) size indicates how many bytes of the recently processed uncompressed data is kept in memory. The algorithm tries to find repeating byte sequences (matches) in the uncompressed data, and replace them with references to the data currently in the dictionary. The bigger the dictionary, the higher is the chance to find a match. Thus, increasing dictionary size usually improves compression ratio, but a dictionary bigger than the uncompressed file is waste of memory.

Typical dictionary size is from 64 KiB to 64 MiB. The minimum is 4 KiB. The maximum for compression is currently 1.5 GiB (1536 MiB). The decompressor already supports dictionaries up to one byte less than 4 GiB, which is the maximum for the LZMA1 and LZMA2 stream formats.

Dictionary size and match finder (mf) together determine the memory usage of the LZMA1 or LZMA2 encoder. The same (or bigger) dictionary size is required for decompressing that was used when compressing, thus the memory usage of the decoder is determined by the dictionary size used when compressing. The .xz headers store the dictionary size either as 2^n or 2^n + 2^(n-1), so these sizes are somewhat preferred for compression. Other sizes will get rounded up when stored in the .xz headers.

lc=lc

Specify the number of literal context bits. The minimum is 0 and the maximum is 4; the default is 3. In addition, the sum of lc and lp must not exceed 4.

All bytes that cannot be encoded as matches are encoded as literals. That is, literals are simply 8-bit bytes that are encoded one at a time.

The literal coding makes an assumption that the highest lc bits of the previous uncompressed byte correlate with the next byte. For example, in typical English text, an upper-case letter is often followed by a lower-case letter, and a lower-case letter is usually followed by another lower-case letter. In the US-ASCII character set, the highest three bits are 010 for upper-case letters and 011 for lower-case letters. When lc is at least 3, the literal coding can take advantage of this property in the uncompressed data.

The default value (3) is usually good. If you want maximum compression, test lc=4. Sometimes it helps a little, and sometimes it makes compression worse. If it makes it worse, test lc=2 too.

lp=lp

Specify the number of literal position bits. The minimum is 0 and the maximum is 4; the default is 0.

Lp affects what kind of alignment in the uncompressed data is assumed when encoding literals. See pb below for more information about alignment.

pb=pb

Specify the number of position bits. The minimum is 0 and the maximum is 4; the default is 2.

Pb affects what kind of alignment in the uncompressed data is assumed in general. The default means four-byte alignment (2^pb=2^2=4), which is often a good choice when there's no better guess.

When the alignment is known, setting pb accordingly may reduce the file size a little. For example, with text files having one-byte alignment (US-ASCII, ISO-8859-*, UTF-8), setting pb=0 can improve compression slightly. For UTF-16 text, pb=1 is a good choice. If the alignment is an odd number like 3 bytes, pb=0 might be the best choice.

Even though the assumed alignment can be adjusted with pb and lp, LZMA1 and LZMA2 still slightly favor 16-byte alignment. It might be worth taking into account when designing file formats that are likely to be often compressed with LZMA1 or LZMA2.

mf=mf

Match finder has a major effect on encoder speed, memory usage, and compression ratio. Usually Hash Chain match finders are faster than Binary Tree match finders. The default depends on the preset: 0 uses hc3, 1–3 use hc4, and the rest use bt4.

The following match finders are supported. The memory usage formulas below are rough approximations, which are closest to the reality when dict is a power of two.

hc3

Hash Chain with 2- and 3-byte hashing
Minimum value for nice: 3
Memory usage:
dict * 7.5 (if dict <= 16 MiB);
dict * 5.5 + 64 MiB (if dict > 16 MiB)

hc4

Hash Chain with 2-, 3-, and 4-byte hashing
Minimum value for nice: 4
Memory usage:
dict * 7.5 (if dict <= 32 MiB);
dict * 6.5 (if dict > 32 MiB)

bt2

Binary Tree with 2-byte hashing
Minimum value for nice: 2
Memory usage: dict * 9.5

bt3

Binary Tree with 2- and 3-byte hashing
Minimum value for nice: 3
Memory usage:
dict * 11.5 (if dict <= 16 MiB);
dict * 9.5 + 64 MiB (if dict > 16 MiB)

bt4

Binary Tree with 2-, 3-, and 4-byte hashing
Minimum value for nice: 4
Memory usage:
dict * 11.5 (if dict <= 32 MiB);
dict * 10.5 (if dict > 32 MiB)

mode=mode

Compression mode specifies the method to analyze the data produced by the match finder. Supported modes are fast and normal. The default is fast for presets 0–3 and normal for presets 4–9.

Usually fast is used with Hash Chain match finders and normal with Binary Tree match finders. This is also what the presets do.

nice=nice

Specify what is considered to be a nice length for a match. Once a match of at least nice bytes is found, the algorithm stops looking for possibly better matches.

Nice can be 2–273 bytes. Higher values tend to give better compression ratio at the expense of speed. The default depends on the preset.

depth=depth

Specify the maximum search depth in the match finder. The default is the special value of 0, which makes the compressor determine a reasonable depth from mf and nice.

Reasonable depth for Hash Chains is 4–100 and 16–1000 for Binary Trees. Using very high values for depth can make the encoder extremely slow with some files. Avoid setting the depth over 1000 unless you are prepared to interrupt the compression in case it is taking far too long.

When decoding raw streams (--format=raw), LZMA2 needs only the dictionary size. LZMA1 needs also lc, lp, and pb.

--x86[=options]

--arm[=options]

--armthumb[=options]

--arm64[=options]

--powerpc[=options]

--ia64[=options]

--sparc[=options]

Add a branch/call/jump (BCJ) filter to the filter chain. These filters can be used only as a non-last filter in the filter chain.

A BCJ filter converts relative addresses in the machine code to their absolute counterparts. This doesn't change the size of the data but it increases redundancy, which can help LZMA2 to produce 0–15 % smaller .xz file. The BCJ filters are always reversible, so using a BCJ filter for wrong type of data doesn't cause any data loss, although it may make the compression ratio slightly worse. The BCJ filters are very fast and use an insignificant amount of memory.

These BCJ filters have known problems related to the compression ratio:

• Some types of files containing executable code (for example, object files, static libraries, and Linux kernel modules) have the addresses in the instructions filled with filler values. These BCJ filters will still do the address conversion, which will make the compression worse with these files.

• If a BCJ filter is applied on an archive, it is possible that it makes the compression ratio worse than not using a BCJ filter. For example, if there are similar or even identical executables then filtering will likely make the files less similar and thus compression is worse. The contents of non-executable files in the same archive can matter too. In practice one has to try with and without a BCJ filter to see which is better in each situation.

Different instruction sets have different alignment: the executable file must be aligned to a multiple of this value in the input data to make the filter work.

Filter	Alignment	Notes
x86	1	32-bit or 64-bit x86
ARM	4
ARM-Thumb	2
ARM64	4	4096-byte alignment is best
PowerPC	4	Big endian only
IA-64	16	Itanium
SPARC	4

Since the BCJ-filtered data is usually compressed with LZMA2, the compression ratio may be improved slightly if the LZMA2 options are set to match the alignment of the selected BCJ filter. For example, with the IA-64 filter, it's good to set pb=4 or even pb=4,lp=4,lc=0 with LZMA2 (2^4=16). The x86 filter is an exception; it's usually good to stick to LZMA2's default four-byte alignment when compressing x86 executables.

All BCJ filters support the same options:

start=offset

Specify the start offset that is used when converting between relative and absolute addresses. The offset must be a multiple of the alignment of the filter (see the table above). The default is zero. In practice, the default is good; specifying a custom offset is almost never useful.

--delta[=options]

Add the Delta filter to the filter chain. The Delta filter can be only used as a non-last filter in the filter chain.

Currently only simple byte-wise delta calculation is supported. It can be useful when compressing, for example, uncompressed bitmap images or uncompressed PCM audio. However, special purpose algorithms may give significantly better results than Delta + LZMA2. This is true especially with audio, which compresses faster and better, for example, with flac(1).

Supported options:

dist=distance

Specify the distance of the delta calculation in bytes. distance must be 1–256. The default is 1.

For example, with dist=2 and eight-byte input A1 B1 A2 B3 A3 B5 A4 B7, the output will be A1 B1 01 02 01 02 01 02.

Other options

-q, --quiet

Suppress warnings and notices. Specify this twice to suppress errors too. This option has no effect on the exit status. That is, even if a warning was suppressed, the exit status to indicate a warning is still used.

-v, --verbose

Be verbose. If standard error is connected to a terminal, xz will display a progress indicator. Specifying --verbose twice will give even more verbose output.

The progress indicator shows the following information:

• Completion percentage is shown if the size of the input file is known. That is, the percentage cannot be shown in pipes.

• Amount of compressed data produced (compressing) or consumed (decompressing).

• Amount of uncompressed data consumed (compressing) or produced (decompressing).

• Compression ratio, which is calculated by dividing the amount of compressed data processed so far by the amount of uncompressed data processed so far.

• Compression or decompression speed. This is measured as the amount of uncompressed data consumed (compression) or produced (decompression) per second. It is shown after a few seconds have passed since xz started processing the file.

• Elapsed time in the format M:SS or H:MM:SS.

• Estimated remaining time is shown only when the size of the input file is known and a couple of seconds have already passed since xz started processing the file. The time is shown in a less precise format which never has any colons, for example, 2 min 30 s.

When standard error is not a terminal, --verbose will make xz print the filename, compressed size, uncompressed size, compression ratio, and possibly also the speed and elapsed time on a single line to standard error after compressing or decompressing the file. The speed and elapsed time are included only when the operation took at least a few seconds. If the operation didn't finish, for example, due to user interruption, also the completion percentage is printed if the size of the input file is known.

-Q, --no-warn

Don't set the exit status to 2 even if a condition worth a warning was detected. This option doesn't affect the verbosity level, thus both --quiet and --no-warn have to be used to not display warnings and to not alter the exit status.

--robot

Print messages in a machine-parsable format. This is intended to ease writing frontends that want to use xz instead of liblzma, which may be the case with various scripts. The output with this option enabled is meant to be stable across xz releases. See the section ROBOT MODE for details.

--info-memory

Display, in human-readable format, how much physical memory (RAM) and how many processor threads xz thinks the system has and the memory usage limits for compression and decompression, and exit successfully.

-h, --help

Display a help message describing the most commonly used options, and exit successfully.

-H, --long-help

Display a help message describing all features of xz, and exit successfully

-V, --version

Display the version number of xz and liblzma in human readable format. To get machine-parsable output, specify --robot before --version.

The robot mode is activated with the --robot option. It makes the output of xz easier to parse by other programs. Currently --robot is supported only together with --version, --info-memory, and --list. It will be supported for compression and decompression in the future.

Version

xz --robot --version prints the version number of xz and liblzma in the following format:

XZ_VERSION=XYYYZZZS
LIBLZMA_VERSION=XYYYZZZS

X

Major version.

YYY

Minor version. Even numbers are stable. Odd numbers are alpha or beta versions.

ZZZ

Patch level for stable releases or just a counter for development releases.

S

Stability. 0 is alpha, 1 is beta, and 2 is stable. S should be always 2 when YYY is even.

XYYYZZZS are the same on both lines if xz and liblzma are from the same XZ Utils release.

Examples: 4.999.9beta is 49990091 and 5.0.0 is 50000002.

Memory limit information

xz --robot --info-memory prints a single line with multiple tab-separated columns:

1. Total amount of physical memory (RAM) in bytes.

2. Memory usage limit for compression in bytes (--memlimit-compress). A special value of 0 indicates the default setting which for single-threaded mode is the same as no limit.

3. Memory usage limit for decompression in bytes (--memlimit-decompress). A special value of 0 indicates the default setting which for single-threaded mode is the same as no limit.

4. Since xz 5.3.4alpha: Memory usage for multi-threaded decompression in bytes (--memlimit-mt-decompress). This is never zero because a system-specific default value shown in the column 5 is used if no limit has been specified explicitly. This is also never greater than the value in the column 3 even if a larger value has been specified with --memlimit-mt-decompress.

5. Since xz 5.3.4alpha: A system-specific default memory usage limit that is used to limit the number of threads when compressing with an automatic number of threads (--threads=0) and no memory usage limit has been specified (--memlimit-compress). This is also used as the default value for --memlimit-mt-decompress.

6. Since xz 5.3.4alpha: Number of available processor threads.

In the future, the output of xz --robot --info-memory may have more columns, but never more than a single line.

List mode

xz --robot --list uses tab-separated output. The first column of every line has a string that indicates the type of the information found on that line:

name

This is always the first line when starting to list a file. The second column on the line is the filename.

file

This line contains overall information about the .xz file. This line is always printed after the name line.

stream

This line type is used only when --verbose was specified. There are as many stream lines as there are streams in the .xz file.

block

This line type is used only when --verbose was specified. There are as many block lines as there are blocks in the .xz file. The block lines are shown after all the stream lines; different line types are not interleaved.

summary

This line type is used only when --verbose was specified twice. This line is printed after all block lines. Like the file line, the summary line contains overall information about the .xz file.

totals

This line is always the very last line of the list output. It shows the total counts and sizes.

The columns of the file lines:

2. Number of streams in the file

3. Total number of blocks in the stream(s)

4. Compressed size of the file

5. Uncompressed size of the file

6. Compression ratio, for example, 0.123. If ratio is over 9.999, three dashes (---) are displayed instead of the ratio.

7. Comma-separated list of integrity check names. The following strings are used for the known check types: None, CRC32, CRC64, and SHA-256. For unknown check types, Unknown-N is used, where N is the Check ID as a decimal number (one or two digits).

8. Total size of stream padding in the file

The columns of the stream lines:

2. Stream number (the first stream is 1)

3. Number of blocks in the stream

4. Compressed start offset

5. Uncompressed start offset

6. Compressed size (does not include stream padding)

7. Uncompressed size

8. Compression ratio

9. Name of the integrity check

10. Size of stream padding

The columns of the block lines:

2. Number of the stream containing this block

3. Block number relative to the beginning of the stream (the first block is 1)

4. Block number relative to the beginning of the file

5. Compressed start offset relative to the beginning of the file

6. Uncompressed start offset relative to the beginning of the file

7. Total compressed size of the block (includes headers)

8. Uncompressed size

9. Compression ratio

10. Name of the integrity check

If --verbose was specified twice, additional columns are included on the block lines. These are not displayed with a single --verbose, because getting this information requires many seeks and can thus be slow:

11. Value of the integrity check in hexadecimal

12. Block header size

13. Block flags: c indicates that compressed size is present, and u indicates that uncompressed size is present. If the flag is not set, a dash (-) is shown instead to keep the string length fixed. New flags may be added to the end of the string in the future.

14. Size of the actual compressed data in the block (this excludes the block header, block padding, and check fields)

15. Amount of memory (in bytes) required to decompress this block with this xz version

16. Filter chain. Note that most of the options used at compression time cannot be known, because only the options that are needed for decompression are stored in the .xz headers.

The columns of the summary lines:

2. Amount of memory (in bytes) required to decompress this file with this xz version

3. yes or no indicating if all block headers have both compressed size and uncompressed size stored in them

Since xz 5.1.2alpha:

4. Minimum xz version required to decompress the file

The columns of the totals line:

2. Number of streams

3. Number of blocks

4. Compressed size

5. Uncompressed size

6. Average compression ratio

7. Comma-separated list of integrity check names that were present in the files

8. Stream padding size

9. Number of files. This is here to keep the order of the earlier columns the same as on file lines.

If --verbose was specified twice, additional columns are included on the totals line:

10. Maximum amount of memory (in bytes) required to decompress the files with this xz version

11. yes or no indicating if all block headers have both compressed size and uncompressed size stored in them

Since xz 5.1.2alpha:

12. Minimum xz version required to decompress the file

Future versions may add new line types and new columns can be added to the existing line types, but the existing columns won't be changed.

0

All is good.

1

An error occurred.

2

Something worth a warning occurred, but no actual errors occurred.

Notices (not warnings or errors) printed on standard error don't affect the exit status.

xz parses space-separated lists of options from the environment variables XZ_DEFAULTS and XZ_OPT, in this order, before parsing the options from the command line. Note that only options are parsed from the environment variables; all non-options are silently ignored. Parsing is done with getopt_long(3) which is used also for the command line arguments.

XZ_DEFAULTS

User-specific or system-wide default options. Typically this is set in a shell initialization script to enable xz's memory usage limiter by default. Excluding shell initialization scripts and similar special cases, scripts must never set or unset XZ_DEFAULTS.

XZ_OPT

This is for passing options to xz when it is not possible to set the options directly on the xz command line. This is the case when xz is run by a script or tool, for example, GNU tar(1):

XZ_OPT=-2v tar caf foo.tar.xz foo

Scripts may use XZ_OPT, for example, to set script-specific default compression options. It is still recommended to allow users to override XZ_OPT if that is reasonable. For example, in sh(1) scripts one may use something like this:

XZ_OPT=${XZ_OPT-"-7e"}
export XZ_OPT

The command line syntax of xz is practically a superset of lzma, unlzma, and lzcat as found from LZMA Utils 4.32.x. In most cases, it is possible to replace LZMA Utils with XZ Utils without breaking existing scripts. There are some incompatibilities though, which may sometimes cause problems.

Compression preset levels

The numbering of the compression level presets is not identical in xz and LZMA Utils. The most important difference is how dictionary sizes are mapped to different presets. Dictionary size is roughly equal to the decompressor memory usage.

Level	xz	LZMA Utils
-0	256 KiB	N/A
-1	1 MiB	64 KiB
-2	2 MiB	1 MiB
-3	4 MiB	512 KiB
-4	4 MiB	1 MiB
-5	8 MiB	2 MiB
-6	8 MiB	4 MiB
-7	16 MiB	8 MiB
-8	32 MiB	16 MiB
-9	64 MiB	32 MiB

The dictionary size differences affect the compressor memory usage too, but there are some other differences between LZMA Utils and XZ Utils, which make the difference even bigger:

Level	xz	LZMA Utils 4.32.x
-0	3 MiB	N/A
-1	9 MiB	2 MiB
-2	17 MiB	12 MiB
-3	32 MiB	12 MiB
-4	48 MiB	16 MiB
-5	94 MiB	26 MiB
-6	94 MiB	45 MiB
-7	186 MiB	83 MiB
-8	370 MiB	159 MiB
-9	674 MiB	311 MiB

The default preset level in LZMA Utils is -7 while in XZ Utils it is -6, so both use an 8 MiB dictionary by default.

Streamed vs. non-streamed .lzma files

The uncompressed size of the file can be stored in the .lzma header. LZMA Utils does that when compressing regular files. The alternative is to mark that uncompressed size is unknown and use end-of-payload marker to indicate where the decompressor should stop. LZMA Utils uses this method when uncompressed size isn't known, which is the case, for example, in pipes.

xz supports decompressing .lzma files with or without end-of-payload marker, but all .lzma files created by xz will use end-of-payload marker and have uncompressed size marked as unknown in the .lzma header. This may be a problem in some uncommon situations. For example, a .lzma decompressor in an embedded device might work only with files that have known uncompressed size. If you hit this problem, you need to use LZMA Utils or LZMA SDK to create .lzma files with known uncompressed size.

Unsupported .lzma files

The .lzma format allows lc values up to 8, and lp values up to 4. LZMA Utils can decompress files with any lc and lp, but always creates files with lc=3 and lp=0. Creating files with other lc and lp is possible with xz and with LZMA SDK.

The implementation of the LZMA1 filter in liblzma requires that the sum of lc and lp must not exceed 4. Thus, .lzma files, which exceed this limitation, cannot be decompressed with xz.

LZMA Utils creates only .lzma files which have a dictionary size of 2^n (a power of 2) but accepts files with any dictionary size. liblzma accepts only .lzma files which have a dictionary size of 2^n or 2^n + 2^(n-1). This is to decrease false positives when detecting .lzma files.

These limitations shouldn't be a problem in practice, since practically all .lzma files have been compressed with settings that liblzma will accept.

Trailing garbage

When decompressing, LZMA Utils silently ignore everything after the first .lzma stream. In most situations, this is a bug. This also means that LZMA Utils don't support decompressing concatenated .lzma files.

If there is data left after the first .lzma stream, xz considers the file to be corrupt unless --single-stream was used. This may break obscure scripts which have assumed that trailing garbage is ignored.

Compressed output may vary

The exact compressed output produced from the same uncompressed input file may vary between XZ Utils versions even if compression options are identical. This is because the encoder can be improved (faster or better compression) without affecting the file format. The output can vary even between different builds of the same XZ Utils version, if different build options are used.

The above means that once --rsyncable has been implemented, the resulting files won't necessarily be rsyncable unless both old and new files have been compressed with the same xz version. This problem can be fixed if a part of the encoder implementation is frozen to keep rsyncable output stable across xz versions.

Embedded .xz decompressors

Embedded .xz decompressor implementations like XZ Embedded don't necessarily support files created with integrity check types other than none and crc32. Since the default is --check=crc64, you must use --check=none or --check=crc32 when creating files for embedded systems.

Outside embedded systems, all .xz format decompressors support all the check types, or at least are able to decompress the file without verifying the integrity check if the particular check is not supported.

XZ Embedded supports BCJ filters, but only with the default start offset.