lzop is a file compressor which is very similar to gzip. lzop uses the LZO data compression library for compression services, and its main advantages over gzip are much higher compression and decompression speed (at the cost of some compression ratio). Typically, text such as source code or English is compressed into 40-50% of the original size, and large files usually compress much better than small ones.
The software reduces the size of the named files. Whenever possible, each file is compressed into one with the extension .lzo, while keeping the same ownership modes, access and modification times. If no files are specified, or if a file name is “-“, lzop tries to compress the standard input to the standard output. lzop will only attempt to compress regular files or symbolic links to regular files. In particular, it will ignore directories.
lzop is one of the fastest compressors available.
lzop is free and open source software.
Key Features
- lzop was designed with the following goals in mind:
- speed (both compression and decompression).
- reasonable drop-in compatibility to gzip.
- portability.
- General functionality and behaviour has been modelled very closely after gzip. The main differences between lzop and gzip are:
- files compressed by lzop will have the suffix `.lzo’.
- lzop does not delete the input file(s) by default.
- Deal with files in many ways:
- Backup mode.
- Single file mode.
- Pipe mode.
- stdout mode.
- Archive mode.
Website: www.lzop.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
lzop is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Compression Tools | |
|---|---|
| LZ4 | Focused on compression and decompression speed |
| Zstandard | Fast compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios |
| brotli | Generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm |
| lzop | File compressor favoring speed over compression ratio |
| pigz | Parallel implementation of gzip |
| ouch | CLI tool for compressing and decompressing for various formats |
| pixz | Parallel, indexed xz compressor |
| gzip | Provides the standard GNU file compression utilities |
| BZip3 | Spiritual successor to BZip2 |
| bzip2 | Freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor |
| PBZIP2 | Parallel implementation of bzip2 |
| lrzip | Achieve very high compression ratios and speed when used with large files |
| lbzip2 | Multi-threaded implementation of bzip2, suited for serial and parallel processing |
| ZXC | High-performance lossless compression library and command-line tool |
| plzip | Massively parallel lossless data compressor |
| p7zip-zstd | p7zip fork with additional codecs and improvements |
| 7-Zip | File archiver with a high compression ratio |
| ncompress | Fast, simple LZW file compressor |
| PXZ | Runs LZMA compression on multiple cores and processors |
| crabz | Like pigz but written in Rust |
| Lzip | Lossless data compressor aimed at Unix-like systems |
| cmix | Optimize compression ratio at the cost of high CPU/memory usage |
| lrzip-next | Long Range ZIP |
| rapidgzip | Parallelized decompression of gzip files |
| igzip | Command-line compression and decompression utility |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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