4 ms·

Am I the only one who is every problems with the download being an lzip file? I really fought with my laziness to search what a "lz" file is, and the command t

Am I the only one who is every problems with the download being an lzip file? I really fought with my laziness to search what a "lz" file is, and the command to use to extract. I'm doing: "tar --lzip -xvf next-linux-gtk-webkit.tar.lz", and getting "tar (child): lzip: Cannot exec: No such file or directory". I guess I have to install lzip and tar isn't enough (so, the command I found was wrong). Is there a reason to not use the more popular (on Linux) tar.gz or even .zip? I assume lzip offers better compression, but I bet I'm not the only one who's heard it for the first time today.

chriswarbo 8y ago
From my understanding (and the biased content at https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html ), lzip is higher compression than zip and gzip. It uses LZMA, which makes it essentially the same as xz (which itself is 7zip without the tar-like functionality). The difference seems to be that the metadata in lzip makes some smarter choices, which reduces redundancy and makes recovering from corruption easier compared to xz. xz is more widely installed, so it's a case of Worse Is Better.