bzip2

What bzip2 is

bzip2 is a free data compressor for creating and reading compressed files. It supports BZ2 (.bz2), BZ (.bz), TBZ2 (.tbz2) and TBZ (.tbz) formats, with command-line tools for Linux and Windows. The maker says its compression results typically fall within 10% to 15% of the best available PPM-family techniques, while compression is around twice as fast and decompression six times faster than those techniques. If media errors damage a file, limited recovery may let users decompress undamaged portions. The libbzip2 library lets programs read and write .bz2 files or compress data in memory. Its command-line flags resemble GNU Gzip's, and the distribution should compile without modification on Unix and Win32 systems. The project dates to 1996 and uses a BSD-style open-source license. The official site lists version 1.0.8 as the current stable release and offers source code, not executables. The source archive includes documentation in several formats.