This is a small program for compressing and decompression with LZ4. LZ4 is a compression algorithm that produces compression ratios somewhat worse than gzip, but decompression is about 10 times faster!

The command line arguments are very similar to gzip.

This program is written in Rust, a blazing fast systems programming language.

Assuming you have Rust's cargo installed, a simple cargo install lz4util will install this program, by the command name lz4.

Compresses big_file, produces big_file.lz4:

lz4 big_file

Decompresses big_file.lz4, produces big_file:

lz4 -d big_file.lz4

Compresses big_file, produces big_file.lz4, but doesn't delete big_file:

lz4 -k big_file

Compresses big_file again, overwriting big_file.lz4, and still doesn't delete big_file:

lz4 -fk big_file

Compress from a pipeline:

find / | lz4 > all_files.lz4

Decompress from a pipeline:

lz4 -d < all_files.lz4 | less