rzip(1) rzip(1)
NAME
rzip - a large-file compression program
SYNOPSIS
rzip [OPTIONS] <files...>
DESCRIPTION
rzip is a file compression program designed to do particularly well on
very large files containing long distance redundancy.
OPTIONS SUMMARY
Here is a summary of the options to rzip.
-0 fastest (worst) compression
-6 default compression
-9 slowest (best) compression
-d decompress
-o filename specify the output file name
-S suffix specify compressed suffix (default '.rz')
-f force overwrite of any existing files
-k keep existing files
-P show compression progress
-V show version
OPTIONS
-h Print an options summary page
-V Print the rzip version number
-0..9 Set the compression level from 0 to 9. The default is to use
level 6, which is a reasonable compromise between speed and com-
pression. The compression level is also strongly related to how
much memory rzip uses, so if you are running rzip on a machine
with limited amounts of memory then you will probably want to
choose a smaller level.
-d Decompress. If this option is not used then rzip looks at the
name used to launch the program. If it contains the string 'run-
zip' then the -d option is automatically set.
-o Set the output file name. If this option is not set then the
output file name is chosen based on the input name and the suf-
fix. The -o option cannot be used if more than one file name is
specified on the command line.
-S Set the compression suffix. The default is '.rz'.
-f If this option is not specified then rzip will not overwrite any
existing files. If you set this option then rzip will silently
overwrite any files as needed.
-k If this option is not specified then rzip will delete the source
file after successful compression or decompression. When this
option is specified then the source files are not deleted.
-P If this option is specified then rzip will show the percentage
progress while compressing.
INSTALLATION
Just install rzip in your search path.
COMPRESSION ALGORITHM
rzip operates in two stages. The first stage finds and encodes large
chunks of duplicated data over potentially very long distances (up to
nearly a gigabyte) in the input file. The second stage is to use a
standard compression algorithm (bzip2) to compress the output of the
first stage.
The key difference between rzip and other well known compression algo-
rithms is its ability to take advantage of very long distance redun-
dancy. The well known deflate algorithm used in gzip uses a maximum
history buffer of 32k. The block sorting algorithm used in bzip2 is
limited to 900k of history. The history buffer in rzip can be up to
900MB long, several orders of magnitude larger than gzip or bzip2.
It is quite common these days to need to compress files that contain
long distance redundancies. For example, when compressing a set of home
directories several users might have copies of the same file, or of
quite similar files. It is also common to have a single file that con-
tains large duplicated chunks over long distances, such as pdf files
containing repeated copies of the same image. Most compression programs
won't be able to take advantage of this redundancy, and thus might
achieve a much lower compression ratio than rzip can achieve.
HISTORY
The ideas behind rzip were first implemented in 1998 while I was work-
ing on rsync. That version was too slow to be practical, and was re-
placed by this version in 2003.
BUGS
Unlike most Unix compression programs, rzip cannot compress or decom-
press to or from standard input or standard output. This is due to the
nature of the algorithm that rzip uses and cannot easily be fixed.
CREDITS
Thanks to the following people for their contributions to rzip
o Paul Russell for many suggestions and the debian packaging
o The authors of bzlib for an excellent library
AUTHOR
rzip was written by Andrew Tridgell http://samba.org/~tridge/
If you wish to report a problem or make a suggestion then please email
bugs-rzip@tridgell.net
rzip is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or
later. Please see the file COPYING for license details.
October 2003 rzip(1)
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