Zutils

Introduction

Zutils is a collection of utilities able to deal with any combination of compressed and non-compressed files transparently. If any given file, including standard input, is compressed, its decompressed content is used. Compressed files are decompressed on the fly; no temporary files are created. These utilities are not wrapper scripts but safer and more efficient C++ programs. In particular the "--recursive" option is very efficient in those utilities supporting it.

The provided utilities are:
Zcat - Decompresses and copies files to standard output.
Zcmp - Decompresses and compares two files byte by byte.
Zdiff - Decompresses and compares two files line by line.
Zgrep - Decompresses and searches files for a regular expression.
Ztest - Tests integrity of compressed files.

The supported formats are bzip2, gzip, lzip and xz.

Documentation

The manual is available in the info system of the GNU Operating System. Use info to access the top level info page. Use info zutils to access the zutils section directly.

An online manual for zutils can be found here.

Download

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

How to Get Help

For general discussion of bugs in zutils the mailing list zutils-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 zutils" it is impossible to differentiate them.

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

How to Help

To contact the author, either to report a bug or to contribute fixes or improvements, send mail to zutils-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 zutils project page at Savannah.

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

Updated: 2013/03/12