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BZIP2(1)		  BSD General Commands Manual		      BZIP2(1)

NAME
     bzip2, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2recover — block-sorting file compressor

SYNOPSIS
     bzip2 [-123456789cdfkLqstVvz] [filename file ...]

     bunzip2 [-fkLVvs] [filename file ...]

     bzcat [-s] [filename file ...]

     bzip2recover filename

DESCRIPTION
     bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text com‐
     pression algorithm, and Huffman coding.  Compression is generally consid‐
     erably better than that achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based
     compressors, and approaches the performance of the PPM family of statis‐
     tical compressors.

     bzcat decompresses files to stdout, and bzip2recover recovers data from
     damaged bzip2 files.

     The command-line options are deliberately very similar to those of
     gzip(1), but they are not identical.

     bzip2 expects a list of file names to accompany the command-line flags.
     Each file is replaced by a compressed version of itself, with the name
     “original_name.bz2”.  Each compressed file has the same modification
     date, permissions, and, when possible, ownership as the corresponding
     original, so that these properties can be correctly restored at decom‐
     pression time.  File name handling is naive in the sense that there is no
     mechanism for preserving original file names, permissions, ownerships or
     dates in filesystems which lack these concepts, or have serious file name
     length restrictions, such as MS-DOS.  bzip2 and bunzip2 will by default
     not overwrite existing files.  If you want this to happen, specify the -f
     flag.

     If no file names are specified, bzip2 compresses from standard input to
     standard output.  In this case, bzip2 will decline to write compressed
     output to a terminal, as this would be entirely incomprehensible and
     therefore pointless.

     bunzip2 (or bzip2 -d) decompresses all specified files.  Files which were
     not created by bzip2 will be detected and ignored, and a warning issued.
     bzip2 attempts to guess the filename for the decompressed file from that
     of the compressed file as follows:

	   filename.bz2	    becomes    filename
	   filename.bz	    becomes    filename
	   filename.tbz2    becomes    filename.tar
	   filename.tbz	    becomes    filename.tar
	   anyothername	    becomes    anyothername.out

     If the file does not end in one of the recognised endings, .bz2, .bz,
     .tbz2, or .tbz, bzip2 complains that it cannot guess the name of the
     original file, and uses the original name with .out appended.

     As with compression, supplying no filenames causes decompression from
     standard input to standard output.

     bunzip2 will correctly decompress a file which is the concatenation of
     two or more compressed files.  The result is the concatenation of the
     corresponding uncompressed files.	Integrity testing (-t) of concatenated
     compressed files is also supported.

     You can also compress or decompress files to the standard output by giv‐
     ing the -c flag.  Multiple files may be compressed and decompressed like
     this.  The resulting outputs are fed sequentially to stdout.  Compression
     of multiple files in this manner generates a stream containing multiple
     compressed file representations.  Such a stream can be decompressed cor‐
     rectly only by bzip2 version 0.9.0 or later.  Earlier versions of bzip2
     will stop after decompressing the first file in the stream.

     bzcat (or bzip2 -dc) decompresses all specified files to the standard
     output.

     Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly
     larger than the original.	Files of less than about one hundred bytes
     tend to get larger, since the compression mechanism has a constant over‐
     head in the region of 50 bytes.  Random data (including the output of
     most file compressors) is coded at about 8.05 bits per byte, giving an
     expansion of around 0.5%.

     As a self-check for your protection, bzip2 uses 32-bit CRCs to make sure
     that the decompressed version of a file is identical to the original.
     This guards against corruption of the compressed data, and against unde‐
     tected bugs in bzip2 (hopefully very unlikely).  The chances of data cor‐
     ruption going undetected is microscopic, about one chance in four billion
     for each file processed.  Be aware, though, that the check occurs upon
     decompression, so it can only tell you that something is wrong.  It can't
     help you recover the original uncompressed data.  You can use
     bzip2recover to try to recover data from damaged files.

OPTIONS
     --			  Treats all subsequent arguments as file names, even
			  if they start with a dash.  This is so you can han‐
			  dle files with names beginning with a dash, for
			  example:
				bzip2 -- -myfilename.

     -1, --fast		  to

     -9, --best		  Set the block size to 100 k, 200 k ... 900 k when
			  compressing.	Has no effect when decompressing.  See
			  MEMORY MANAGEMENT below.  The --fast and --best
			  aliases are primarily for GNU gzip(1) compatibility.
			  In particular, --fast doesn't make things signifi‐
			  cantly faster, and --best merely selects the default
			  behaviour.

     -c, --stdout	  Compress or decompress to standard output.

     -d, --decompress	  Force decompression.	bzip2, bunzip2, and bzcat are
			  really the same program, and the decision about what
			  actions to take is done on the basis of which name
			  is used.  This flag overrides that mechanism, and
			  forces bzip2 to decompress.

     -f, --force	  Force overwrite of output files.  Normally, bzip2
			  will not overwrite existing output files.  Also
			  forces bzip2 to break hard links to files, which it
			  otherwise wouldn't do.

			  bzip2 normally declines to decompress files which
			  don't have the correct magic header bytes.  If
			  forced (-f), however, it will pass such files
			  through unmodified.  This is how GNU gzip(1)
			  behaves.

     -k, --keep		  Keep (don't delete) input files during compression
			  or decompression.

     -L, --license	  Display the license terms and conditions.

     -q, --quiet	  Suppress non-essential warning messages.  Messages
			  pertaining to I/O errors and other critical events
			  will not be suppressed.

     --repetitive-fast

     --repetitive-best	  These flags are redundant in versions 0.9.5 and
			  above.  They provided some coarse control over the
			  behaviour of the sorting algorithm in earlier ver‐
			  sions, which was sometimes useful.  0.9.5 and above
			  have an improved algorithm which renders these flags
			  irrelevant.

     -s, --small	  Reduce memory usage, for compression, decompression
			  and testing.	Files are decompressed and tested
			  using a modified algorithm which only requires 2.5
			  bytes per block byte.	 This means any file can be
			  decompressed in 2300k of memory, albeit at about
			  half the normal speed.  During compression, -s
			  selects a block size of 200k, which limits memory
			  use to around the same figure, at the expense of
			  your compression ratio.  In short, if your machine
			  is low on memory (8 megabytes or less), use -s for
			  everything.  See MEMORY MANAGEMENT below.

     -t, --test		  Check integrity of the specified file(s), but don't
			  decompress them.  This really performs a trial
			  decompression and throws away the result.

     -V, --version	  Display the software version.

     -v, --verbose	  Verbose mode: show the compression ratio for each
			  file processed.  Further -v's increase the verbosity
			  level, spewing out lots of information which is pri‐
			  marily of interest for diagnostic purposes.

     -z, --compress	  The complement to Fl d : forces compression, regard‐
			  less of the invocation name.

   MEMORY MANAGEMENT
     bzip2 compresses large files in blocks.  The block size affects both the
     compression ratio achieved, and the amount of memory needed for compres‐
     sion and decompression.  The flags -1 through -9 specify the block size
     to be 100,000 bytes through 900,000 bytes (the default) respectively.  At
     decompression time, the block size used for compression is read from the
     header of the compressed file, and bunzip2 then allocates itself just
     enough memory to decompress the file.  Since block sizes are stored in
     compressed files, it follows that the flags -1 to -9 are irrelevant to
     and so ignored during decompression.

     Compression and decompression requirements, in bytes, can be estimated
     as:

	   Compression:	   400k + ( 8 x block size )

	   Decompression:  100k + ( 4 x block size ), or 100k + ( 2.5 x block
			   size )
     Larger block sizes give rapidly diminishing marginal returns.  Most of
     the compression comes from the first two or three hundred k of block
     size, a fact worth bearing in mind when using bzip2 on small machines.
     It is also important to appreciate that the decompression memory require‐
     ment is set at compression time by the choice of block size.

     For files compressed with the default 900k block size, bunzip2 will
     require about 3700 kbytes to decompress.  To support decompression of any
     file on a 4 megabyte machine, bunzip2 has an option to decompress using
     approximately half this amount of memory, about 2300 kbytes.  Decompres‐
     sion speed is also halved, so you should use this option only where nec‐
     essary.  The relevant flag is -s.

     In general, try and use the largest block size memory constraints allow,
     since that maximises the compression achieved.  Compression and decom‐
     pression speed are virtually unaffected by block size.

     Another significant point applies to files which fit in a single block --
     that means most files you'd encounter using a large block size.  The
     amount of real memory touched is proportional to the size of the file,
     since the file is smaller than a block.  For example, compressing a file
     20,000 bytes long with the flag -9 will cause the compressor to allocate
     around 7600k of memory, but only touch 400k + 20000 * 8 = 560 kbytes of
     it.  Similarly, the decompressor will allocate 3700k but only touch 100k
     + 20000 * 4 = 180 kbytes.

     Here is a table which summarises the maximum memory usage for different
     block sizes.  Also recorded is the total compressed size for 14 files of
     the Calgary Text Compression Corpus totalling 3,141,622 bytes.  This col‐
     umn gives some feel for how compression varies with block size.  These
     figures tend to understate the advantage of larger block sizes for larger
     files, since the Corpus is dominated by smaller files.

     Flag   Compression	  Decompression	  Decompression -s   Corpus size
     -1	    1200k	  500k		  350k		     914704
     -2	    2000k	  900k		  600k		     877703
     -3	    2800k	  1300k		  850k		     860338
     -4	    3600k	  1700k		  1100k		     846899
     -5	    4400k	  2100k		  1350k		     845160
     -6	    5200k	  2500k		  1600k		     838626
     -7	    6100k	  2900k		  1850k		     834096
     -8	    6800k	  3300k		  2100k		     828642
     -9	    7600k	  3700k		  2350k		     828642

   RECOVERING DATA FROM DAMAGED FILES
     bzip2 compresses files in blocks, usually 900kbytes long.	Each block is
     handled independently.  If a media or transmission error causes a multi-
     block .bz2 file to become damaged, it may be possible to recover data
     from the undamaged blocks in the file.

     The compressed representation of each block is delimited by a 48-bit pat‐
     tern, which makes it possible to find the block boundaries with reason‐
     able certainty.  Each block also carries its own 32-bit CRC, so damaged
     blocks can be distinguished from undamaged ones.

     bzip2recover is a simple program whose purpose is to search for blocks in
     .bz2 files, and write each block out into its own .bz2 file.  You can
     then use bzip2 -t to test the integrity of the resulting files, and
     decompress those which are undamaged.

     bzip2recover takes a single argument, the name of the damaged file, and
     writes a number of files “rec00001file.bz2”, “rec00002file.bz2”, etc.,
     containing the extracted blocks.  The output filenames are designed so
     that the use of wildcards in subsequent processing -- for example,
	   bzip2 -dc rec*file.bz2 > recovered_data
     -- processes the files in the correct order.

     bzip2recover should be of most use dealing with large .bz2 files, as
     these will contain many blocks.  It is clearly futile to use it on dam‐
     aged single-block files, since a damaged block cannot be recovered.  If
     you wish to minimise any potential data loss through media or transmis‐
     sion errors, you might consider compressing with a smaller block size.

   PERFORMANCE NOTES
     The sorting phase of compression gathers together similar strings in the
     file.  Because of this, files containing very long runs of repeated sym‐
     bols, like “aabaabaabaab...” (repeated several hundred times) may com‐
     press more slowly than normal.  Versions 0.9.5 and above fare much better
     than previous versions in this respect.  The ratio between worst-case and
     average-case compression time is in the region of 10:1.  For previous
     versions, this figure was more like 100:1.	 You can use the -vvvv option
     to monitor progress in great detail, if you want.

     Decompression speed is unaffected by these phenomena.

     bzip2 usually allocates several megabytes of memory to operate in, and
     then charges all over it in a fairly random fashion.  This means that
     performance, both for compressing and decompressing, is largely deter‐
     mined by the speed at which your machine can service cache misses.
     Because of this, small changes to the code to reduce the miss rate have
     been observed to give disproportionately large performance improvements.
     I imagine bzip2 will perform best on machines with very large caches.

ENVIRONMENT
     bzip2 will read arguments from the environment variables BZIP2 and BZIP,
     in that order, and will process them before any arguments read from the
     command line.  This gives a convenient way to supply default arguments.

EXIT STATUS
     0 for a normal exit, 1 for environmental problems (file not found,
     invalid flags, I/O errors, etc.), 2 to indicate a corrupt compressed
     file, 3 for an internal consistency error (e.g., bug) which caused bzip2
     to panic.

AUTHORS
     Julian Seward ⟨jseward@bzip.org⟩

     http://www.bzip.org

     The ideas embodied in bzip2 are due to (at least) the following people:
     Michael Burrows and David Wheeler (for the block sorting transformation),
     David Wheeler (again, for the Huffman coder), Peter Fenwick (for the
     structured coding model in the original bzip, and many refinements), and
     Alistair Moffat, Radford Neal, and Ian Witten (for the arithmetic coder
     in the original bzip).  I am much indebted for their help, support and
     advice.  See the manual in the source distribution for pointers to
     sources of documentation.	Christian von Roques encouraged me to look for
     faster sorting algorithms, so as to speed up compression.	Bela Lubkin
     encouraged me to improve the worst-case compression performance.  Donna
     Robinson XMLised the documentation.  The bz* scripts are derived from
     those of GNU gzip.	 Many people sent patches, helped with portability
     problems, lent machines, gave advice and were generally helpful.

CAVEATS
     I/O error messages are not as helpful as they could be.  bzip2 tries hard
     to detect I/O errors and exit cleanly, but the details of what the prob‐
     lem is sometimes seem rather misleading.

     This manual page pertains to version 1.0.6 of bzip2.  Compressed data
     created by this version is entirely forwards and backwards compatible
     with the previous public releases, versions 0.1pl2, 0.9.0, 0.9.5, 1.0.0,
     1.0.1, 1.0.2 and above, but with the following exception: 0.9.0 and above
     can correctly decompress multiple concatenated compressed files.  0.1pl2
     cannot do this; it will stop after decompressing just the first file in
     the stream.

     bzip2recover versions prior to 1.0.2 used 32-bit integers to represent
     bit positions in compressed files, so they could not handle compressed
     files more than 512 megabytes long.  Versions 1.0.2 and above use 64-bit
     ints on some platforms which support them (GNU supported targets, and
     Windows).	To establish whether or not bzip2recover was built with such a
     limitation, run it without arguments.  In any event you can build your‐
     self an unlimited version if you can recompile it with MaybeUInt64 set to
     be an unsigned 64-bit integer.

BSD				 May 14, 2010				   BSD
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