scripts/archivers/README.md

lz.sh (lz and uz)
=================

The `lz.sh` script emulates and extends commands `lz` and `uz` from the mtools.

**Note**: although `lz.sh` is more powerful than mtools' `lz` and `uz`, you
should probably use `als` and `aunpack` from the atool package instead; they
are much better and atool provides several other useful commands as well. This
script is still useful when you can't install Perl (atool is written in Perl).

This script handles the following archive formats through the standards options
of GNU Tar:

- tar
- tar.gz (tgz)
- tar.bz2 (tbz, tb2)
- tar.xz (txz)
- tar.lzma (tlz)
- tar.Z (taz)

Note that you need GNU Tar, at least version 1.20 to support LZMA compressed
archives, and version 1.22 for XZ compressed ones.

If the script is called as `lz`, the archive content is displayed. When called
as `uz`, it is extracted.

To install `lz` and `uz`, move the script as `lz` in a directory in your `PATH`
(for instance `/usr/local/bin` or `$HOME/bin`) and hard link it to `uz`:

    cp lz.sh /usr/local/bin/lz
    ln /usr/local/bin/{lz,uz}

Alternatively, you can use the symbolic links provided along with the
repository by adding the `bin` directory to your `PATH`, as explained in the
main `README.md` file.


xzize.sh
========

The `xzize.sh` script compresses an uncompressed file, or recompresses a
compressed file to XZ (with default compression level).

Known compression formats are GZip (.gz), BZip2 (.bz2), LZMA (.lzma), and
Lempel-Ziv (.Z). Short tar compressed suffixes are also allowed: .tgz, .tbz,
.tb2, .tlz, .taz (and the output file's extension will be .txz).

In case of recompression, the original compressed file is kept (so you can
compare input and output file sizes and decide to keep the original or the
recompressed file). In case of compression (i.e. when the suffix of the file
does not correspond to a known compression format), the original uncompressed
file is removed.

**Note**: the atool package provides the `arepack` command, which can
recompress to several formats and not only to XZ. `xzize` has the advantage to
recompress on the fly rather than unpacking the archive entirely on the file
system and repacking it afterwards.