Lzlib

Introduction

The lzlib compression library provides in-memory LZMA compression and decompression functions, including integrity checking of the uncompressed data. The compressed data format used by the library is the lzip format.

The functions and variables forming the interface of the compression library are declared in the file lzlib.h. An usage example of the library is given in the file main.cc.

Compression/decompression is done by repeteadly calling a couple of read/write functions until all the data has been processed by the library. This interface is safer and less error prone than the traditional zlib interface.

Lzlib will correctly decompress a data stream which is the concatenation of two or more compressed data streams. The result is the concatenation of the corresponding uncompressed data streams. Integrity testing of concatenated compressed data streams is also supported.

All the library functions are thread safe. The library does not install any signal handler. The decoder checks the consistency of the compressed data, so the library should never crash even in case of corrupted input.

Lzlib implements a simplified version of the LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) algorithm. The original LZMA algorithm was designed by Igor Pavlov. For a description of the LZMA algorithm, see the lzip manual.

Download

The latest released version of lzlib can be found here. You may also subscribe to Freshmeat and receive an email every time a new version is released.

How to Get Help

An online manual for lzlib can be found here.

For general discussion of bugs in lzlib the mailing list lzip-bug@nongnu.org is the most appropriate forum. Please send messages as plain text. Please do not send messages encoded as HTML nor encoded as base64 MIME nor included as multiple formats. Please include a descriptive subject line. If all of the subject are "bug in lzlib" it is impossible to differentiate them.

An archive of the bug report mailing list is available at http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lzip-bug.

How to Help

To contact the author, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to lzip-bug@nongnu.org. Please send messages as plain text. If posting patches they should be in unified diff format against the latest version. They should include a text description.

See also the lzip project page at Savannah.

You are free to copy, modify and distribute all or part of this article without limitation.

Updated: 2010/02/16