XZDEC(1)

💖 XZDEC — ok bestie, let's talk tiny decompressors 💖

so this is the manual for xzdec and lzmadec — the little sibling tools from XZ Utils that do exactly one job and do it cute. no cap. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

xzdec, lzmadec — small .xz and .lzma decompressors 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xzdec [option...]  [file...]
lzmadec [option...]  [file...]

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so. xzdec is a liblzma-based decompression-only tool for .xz files — and only .xz files, don't try it. it's literally designed to be a drop-in replacement for xz(1) in the most common situations where a script was written to use xz --decompress --stdout (and maybe a few other commonly used options) to decompress .xz files. that's the whole assignment. 🫶

and lzmadec? identical to xzdec in every way except that it supports .lzma files instead of .xz files. twins fr fr. 👑

now the tea ☕ — to reduce the size of the executable, xzdec does not support:

• multithreading
• localization
• reading options from the XZ_DEFAULTS and XZ_OPT environment variables

and it doesn't support displaying intermediate progress information either. so sending SIGINFO to xzdec does nothing, but sending SIGUSR1 terminates the process instead of displaying progress information. so don't do that unless you want it gone 💀

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -d, --decompress, --uncompress — ignored, but it's there for xz(1) compatibility. xzdec only does decompression anyway, so it's giving "sure bestie, whatever you say" 🌸
• -k, --keep — also ignored for xz(1) compatibility. xzdec never creates or removes any files. periodt. 🙈
• -c, --stdout, --to-stdout — ignored for xz(1) compatibility. xzdec always writes the decompressed data to standard output. that's just the vibe. ✨
• -q, --quiet — specifying this once does literally nothing, since xzdec never displays any warnings or notices. specify it twice to suppress errors. it's giving "double tap to mute" 💀
• -Q, --no-warn — ignored for xz(1) compatibility. xzdec never uses the exit status 2, so there's nothing to warn about 🎀
• -h, --help — display a help message and exit successfully. slay 💖
• -V, --version — display the version number of xzdec and liblzma. iykyk ⭐

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🔥 EXIT STATUS 🔥

• 0 — all was good. we ate. 👑
• 1 — an error occurred. 😭

xzdec doesn't have any warning messages like xz(1) has, thus the exit status 2 is not used by xzdec. so if you see a 2, bestie, that's not us 🫶

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🧚 NOTES 🧚

use xz(1) instead of xzdec or lzmadec for normal everyday use. xzdec or lzmadec are meant only for situations where it is important to have a smaller decompressor than the full-featured xz(1). niche queen energy 💅

now don't get it twisted — xzdec and lzmadec are not really that small. 😭 the size can be reduced further by dropping features from liblzma at compile time, but that shouldn't usually be done for executables distributed in typical non-embedded operating system distributions. and if you need a truly small .xz decompressor, consider using XZ Embedded. different tool, different vibe. 🌈

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🌟 SEE ALSO 🌟

• xz(1)
• XZ Embedded: https://tukaani.org/xz/embedded.html

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! brought to you by Tukaani 💖 version vibes from XZ Utils, dated 2024-04-08. go decompress something tiny, you got this 🎀✨🦋