I wrote a tool, pixz, that does xz compression in parallel to take advantage of multiple cores. It also indexes xz-compressed tarballs, so you can extract an in

I wrote a tool, pixz, that does xz compression in parallel to take advantage of multiple cores. It also indexes xz-compressed tarballs, so you can extract an individual file very quickly instead of needing to decompress the entire tarball. The parallel-compressed, self-contained tarball+index is fully compatible with regular tar/xz, you don't need any special tools to extract it. http://github.com/vasi/pixz http://github.com/vasi/pixz The interface is still very rough, but it works. The xz utility comes with a very nice library and API, which made this a lot easier--thanks, Lasse!