gzstream is a small library for providing zlib functionality in a C++ iostream.

ZZipLib is a library based on zlib for accessing zip files.

Zstandard (zstd) is a lossless compression algorithm that combines very fast operation with a compression ratio comparable to that of zlib. In most scenarios, both compression and decompression can be performed in ‘real time’. The compressor can be configured to provide the most suitable trade-off between compression ratio and speed, without affecting decompression speed.

This package provides the reference implementation of Brotli, a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. It is similar in speed with deflate but offers more dense compression.

The specification of the Brotli Compressed Data Format is defined in RFC 7932.

GNU Gzip provides data compression and decompression utilities; the typical extension is ".gz". Unlike the "zip" format, it compresses a single file; as a result, it is often used in conjunction with "tar", resulting in ".tar.gz" or ".tgz", etc.

SfArk extractor converts SoundFonts in the compressed legacy sfArk file format to the uncompressed sf2 format.

libtar is a C library for manipulating POSIX tar files. It handles adding and extracting files to/from a tar archive.

Draco is a library for compressing and decompressing 3D geometric meshes and point clouds. It is intended to improve the storage and transmission of 3D graphics.

UCL implements a number of compression algorithms that achieve an excellent compression ratio while allowing fast decompression. Decompression requires no additional memory.

Compared to LZO, the UCL algorithms achieve a better compression ratio but decompression is a little bit slower.

bzip2 is a freely available, patent free (see below), high-quality data compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques (the PPM family of statistical compressors), whilst being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression.

The Ultimate Packer for eXecutables (UPX) is an executable file compressor. UPX typically reduces the file size of programs and shared libraries by around 50%--70%, thus reducing disk space, network load times, download times, and other distribution and storage costs.

Tarlz is a massively parallel (multi-threaded) combined implementation of the tar archiver and the lzip compressor. Tarlz creates, lists, and extracts archives in a simplified and safer variant of the POSIX pax format compressed with lzip, keeping the alignment between tar members and lzip members. The resulting multimember tar.lz archive is fully backward compatible with standard tar tools like GNU tar, which treat it like any other tar.lz archive. Tarlz can append files to the end of such compressed archives.

LZ4 is a lossless compression algorithm, providing compression speed at 400 MB/s per core (0.16 Bytes/cycle). It also features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core (0.71 Bytes/cycle). A high compression derivative, called LZ4_HC, is also provided. It trades CPU time for compression ratio.

ECM is a utility that converts ECM files, i.e., CD data files with their error correction data losslessly rearranged for better compression, to their original, binary CD format.

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).

Blosc is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data (i.e. floating point numbers, integers and booleans, although it can handle string data too). It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() system call. Blosc main goal is not just to reduce the size of large datasets on-disk or in-memory, but also to accelerate memory-bound computations.

C-Blosc2 is the new major version of C-Blosc, and is backward compatible with both the C-Blosc1 API and its in-memory format. However, the reverse thing is generally not true for the format; buffers generated with C-Blosc2 are not format-compatible with C-Blosc1 (i.e. forward compatibility is not supported).

7-zip is a command-line file compressor that supports a number of archive formats and features self-extracting archives.

lrzip is a compression utility that uses long-range redundancy reduction to improve the subsequent compression ratio of larger files. It can then further compress the result with the ZPAQ or LZMA algorithms for maximum compression, or LZO for maximum speed. This choice between size or speed allows for either better compression than even LZMA can provide, or a higher speed than gzip while compressing as well as bzip2.

This package provides a parallel implementation of gzip that exploits multiple processors and multiple cores when compressing data.

The existing XZ Utils provide great compression in the .xz file format, but they produce just one big block of compressed data. Pixz instead produces a collection of smaller blocks which makes random access to the original data possible and can compress in parallel. This is especially useful for large tarballs.

minizip-ng is a zip manipulation library written in C, forked from the zip manipulation library found in the zlib distribution.

LZO is a data compression library which is suitable for data de-/compression in real-time. This means it favours speed over compression ratio.

LZO is written in ANSI C. Both the source code and the compressed data format are designed to be portable across platforms.

Squashfs is a highly compressed read-only file system for Linux. It compresses files, inodes, and directories with one of several compressors. All blocks are packed to minimize the data overhead, and block sizes of between 4K and 1M are supported. It is intended to be used for archival use, for live media, and for embedded systems where low overhead is needed.

The squashfs-tools-ng package offers alternative tooling to create and extract such file systems. It is not based on the older squashfs-tools package and its tools have different names:

1. gensquashfs produces SquashFS images from a directory or gen_init_cpio-like file listings and can generate SELinux labels.

2. rdsquashfs inspects and unpacks SquashFS images.

3. sqfs2tar and tar2sqfs convert between SquashFS and tarballs.

4. sqfsdiff compares the contents of two SquashFS images.

These commands are largely command-line wrappers around the included libsquashfs library that intends to make SquashFS available to other applications as an embeddable, extensible archive format.

Both the library and tools operate deterministically: same input will produce byte-for-byte identical output.

unshield is a tool and library for extracting .cab archives from InstallShield installers.