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XZDEC(1)                                               XZ Utils                                              XZDEC(1)



NAME
       xzdec, lzmadec - Small .xz and .lzma decompressors

SYNOPSIS
       xzdec [option...]  [file...]
       lzmadec [option...]  [file...]

DESCRIPTION
       xzdec is a liblzma-based decompression-only tool for .xz (and only .xz) files.  xzdec is intended to work as a
       drop-in replacement for xz(1) in the most common situations where a script has been written to use xz --decom‐
       press --stdout (and possibly a few other commonly used options) to decompress .xz files.  lzmadec is identical
       to xzdec except that lzmadec supports .lzma files instead of .xz files.

       To reduce the size of the executable, xzdec doesn't support multithreading or localization, and  doesn't  read
       options  from  XZ_DEFAULTS  and  XZ_OPT  environment variables.  xzdec doesn't support displaying intermediate
       progress information: sending SIGINFO to xzdec does  nothing,  but  sending  SIGUSR1  terminates  the  process
       instead of displaying progress information.

OPTIONS
       -d, --decompress, --uncompress
              Ignored for xz(1) compatibility.  xzdec supports only decompression.

       -k, --keep
              Ignored for xz(1) compatibility.  xzdec never creates or removes any files.

       -c, --stdout, --to-stdout
              Ignored for xz(1) compatibility.  xzdec always writes the decompressed data to standard output.

       -q, --quiet
              Specifying  this  once  does  nothing since xzdec never displays any warnings or notices.  Specify this
              twice to suppress errors.

       -Q, --no-warn
              Ignored for xz(1) compatibility.  xzdec never uses the exit status 2.

       -h, --help
              Display a help message and exit successfully.

       -V, --version
              Display the version number of xzdec and liblzma.

EXIT STATUS
       0      All was good.

       1      An error occurred.

       xzdec doesn't have any warning messages like xz(1) has, thus the exit status 2 is not used by xzdec.

NOTES
       Use xz(1) instead of xzdec or lzmadec for normal everyday use.  xzdec or lzmadec are meant only for situations
       where it is important to have a smaller decompressor than the full-featured xz(1).

       xzdec  and  lzmadec  are  not  really  that  small.  The size can be reduced further by dropping features from
       liblzma at compile time, but that shouldn't usually be done for executables distributed in typical  non-embed‐
       ded operating system distributions.  If you need a truly small .xz decompressor, consider using XZ Embedded.