PRISTINE-GZ(1)

💖 PRISTINE-GZ(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to pristine-gz — section 1 of the manual, the one and only, she regenerates pristine gz files ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pristine-gz — regenerate pristine gz files 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pristine-gz [OPTIONS] gendelta file.gz delta

pristine-gz [OPTIONS] gengz delta file

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so this is a little sidekick to the pristine-tar(1) command 👑 and ngl you usually do not need to run it by hand, because pristine-tar will just call it whenever it needs to deal with .tar.gz files. she's the backup dancer, not the main act (except she IS the main act in our hearts).

pristine-gz gendelta takes the gz file you point at, and generates a small binary delta file that can later be used by pristine-gz gengz to recreate the original file. it's giving time capsule 🎀

pristine-gz gengz takes the delta file you point at, and compresses the input file you give it (and that input file must be identical to the contents of the original gz file, no cap). The resulting file will be identical to the original gz file used to create the delta. literally identical. fr fr 💯

The approach used to regenerate the original gz file is to figure out how it was produced — like, what compression level was used, whether it was built with GNU gzip(1) or with a library or BSD version, whether the --rsyncable option was used, etc, etc — and then to reproduce this build environment when regenerating the gz. detective work but make it ✨forensics✨ 🔍

This approach will work for about 99.5% of cases. One example of a case it cannot currently support is a gz file that has been produced by appending together multiple gz files. (rip to that one specific vibe 😭)

For the few where it doesn't work, a binary diff will be included in the delta between the closest regeneratable gz file and the original. In the worst case, the diff will include the entire content of the original gz file, resulting in a larger than usual delta 💀 If the delta is much larger than usual, pristine-gz will print a warning. so if you see a warning, that's what's up.

If the delta filename is -, pristine-gz reads or writes it to stdio 🫶

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🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

• -v, --verbose — Verbose mode, show each command that is run. she tells you everything, she's an oversharer and we love her for it 🗣️
• -d, --debug — Debug mode. for when you need the deep lore 🔍
• -k, --keep — Don't clean up the temporary directory on exit. hoarder mode activated 🙈

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🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

• TMPDIR — Specifies a location to place temporary files, other than the default. tell her where to dump her stuff bestie 💜

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>, Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org>, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>

Licensed under the GPL, version 2. 📜

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and that's the whole page, periodt 💅

mwah 💖 this page is perl v5.38.2, dated 2024-04-01 — that's the version and the date, slay, go forth and regenerate those gz files bestie 🦋