lrzip (Long Range ZIP or Lzma RZIP) is a file compression program designed to do particularly well on very large files containing long distance redundancy. lrztar is a wrapper for lrzip to simplify compression and decompression of directories. lrzip uses an extended version of rzip which does a first pass long distance redundancy reduction. The lrzip modifications make it scale according to memory size. The data is then either: 1. Compressed by lzma (default), zpaq, lzo, gzip or bzip2. 2. Left uncompressed and rzip prepared. The major disadvantages are: 1. The main lrzip application only works on single files so it requires the lrztar wrapper to fake a complete archiver. 2. It requires a lot of memory to get the best performance out of, and is not really usable (for compression) with less than 256MB. Decompression requires less ram and works on smaller ram machines. 3. It works on stdin/out but in a very inefficient manner generating temporary files on disk so this method of using lrzip is not recommended. 4. Files compressed on a 64 bit OS with a compression window greater than 20 (2 GB) may not decompress on a 32 bit OS. See the file README.benchmarks for performance examples and what kind of data lrzip is very good with.