MINILZIP(1)

📦
version 1.16 · 5 versions
, in arch rolling, ubuntu stonking

💖 MINILZIP(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the User Commands section of the manual, because today we're talking about minilzip — the little test program that reduces the size of files and honestly? she ate. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

minilzip — reduces the size of files 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

minilzip [options] [files]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the tea. Minilzip is a test program for the compression library lzlib. Like, that's her whole job — she's the lab rat for lzlib. Minilzip is not intended to be installed because lzip has more features, but ngl minilzip is well tested and you can totally use it as your main compressor if you want to. no cap, she's built different. 👑

Lzip is a lossless data compressor with a user interface similar to the one of gzip or bzip2. Lzip uses a simplified form of LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) and is designed to achieve complete interoperability between implementations. The maximum dictionary size is 512 MiB so that any lzip file can be decompressed on 32-bit machines. Lzip provides accurate and robust 3-factor integrity checking. lzip -0 compresses about as fast as gzip, while lzip -9 compresses most files more than bzip2. Decompression speed is intermediate between gzip and bzip2. Lzip provides better data recovery capabilities than gzip and bzip2. Lzip has been designed, written, and tested with great care to replace gzip and bzip2 as general-purpose compressed format for Unix-like systems. iconic behaviour, truly. 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -h — display usage help and exit 🙈
  • --help — display full help and exit 💖
  • -V, --version — output version information and exit ⭐
  • -a, --trailing-error — exit with error status if trailing data
  • -b, --member-size=<bytes> — set member size limit of multimember files
  • -c, --stdout — write to standard output, keep input files
  • -d, --decompress — decompress, test compressed file integrity 🔍
  • -f, --force — overwrite existing output files
  • -F, --recompress — force re-compression of compressed files
  • -k, --keep — keep (don't delete) input files 🫶
  • -m, --match-length=<bytes> — set match length limit in bytes [36]
  • -o, --output=<file> — write to <file>, keep input files
  • -q, --quiet — suppress all messages 🤫
  • -s, --dictionary-size=<bytes> — set dictionary size limit in bytes [8 MiB]
  • -S, --volume-size=<bytes> — set volume size limit in bytes
  • -t, --test — test compressed file integrity
  • -v, --verbose — be verbose (a 2nd -v gives more) 🗣️
  • -0 .. -9 — set compression level [default 6]
  • --loose-trailing — allow trailing data seeming corrupt header
  • --check-lib — compare version of lzlib.h with liblz.{a,so}

If no file names are given, or if a file is -, minilzip compresses or decompresses from standard input to standard output. Numbers may contain underscore separators between groups of digits and may be followed by a SI or binary multiplier: 1_234_567kB, 4KiB. Dictionary sizes 12 to 29 are interpreted as powers of two, meaning 2^12 to 2^29 bytes. 💫

The bidimensional parameter space of LZMA can't be mapped to a linear scale optimal for all files. If your files are large, very repetitive, etc, you may need to use the options --dictionary-size and --match-length directly to achieve optimal performance. like, sometimes you just gotta hand-tune her. 💅

To extract all the files from archive foo.tar.lz, use the commands tar -xf foo.tar.lz or minilzip -cd foo.tar.lz | tar -xf -. 🍓

The ideas embodied in lzlib are due to (at least) the following people: Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv (for the LZ algorithm), Andrei Markov (for the definition of Markov chains), G.N.N. Martin (for the definition of range encoding), Igor Pavlov (for putting all the above together in LZMA), and Julian Seward (for bzip2's CLI). shoutout to the founding fathers fr fr 👑

🌟 EXIT STATUS 🌟

  • 0 — a normal exit, we slayed ✨
  • 1 — environmental problems (file not found, invalid command-line options, I/O errors, etc) 😭
  • 2 — a corrupt or invalid input file 💀
  • 3 — an internal consistency error (e.g., bug) which caused minilzip to panic 🙈
bestie if you get a 3, she's literally panicking. that's not you, that's a bug.

📢 REPORTING BUGS 📢

Report bugs to lzip-bug@nongnu.org — tell them everything, they wanna know 🫶

Lzlib home page: http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzlib.html

Copyright © 2026 Antonio Diaz Diaz. License GPLv2+: GNU GPL version 2 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Using lzlib 1.16 Using LZ_API_VERSION = 1016

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

The full documentation for minilzip is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and minilzip programs are properly installed at your site, the command

info lzlib

should give you access to the complete manual. iykyk 📖✨

minilzip 1.16 · March 2026 · MINILZIP(1) — mwah, go compress something, bestie 💋🎀🦋

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