# 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 name is "lz", the archive content is displayed. If the
name is "uz", it is extracted.

To install lz and uz, move put script in a directory in the PATH (for
instance /usr/local/bin) and hard link it to uz:
  cp lz.sh /usr/local/bin/lz
  ln /usr/local/bin/{lz,uz}

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


# xzize.sh #

The xzize 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.

In case of recompression, the original compressed file is kept. 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.