ouch is a CLI tool for compressing and decompressing for various formats.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Easy to use.
- Fast.
- Great error message feedback.
- No runtime dependencies required (for Linux x86_64).
- Accessibility mode. Ouch has an accessible mode that formats every message in a way that is friendly to Text To Speech (TTS) programs to read, it also outputs less text, so that decompressing huge archives only logs useful pieces of information.
- Shell completions and man pages.
Website: github.com/ouch-org/ouch
Support:
Developer: Vinícius R. Miguel, João Marcos P. Bezerra and contributors
License: MIT License

ouch is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
This article was written with the help of a site visitor who completed this form. Help the site by suggesting new open source software.
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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