XZ File Extension
Have a problem opening a .XZ file? We collect information about file formats and can explain what XZ files are. Additionally we recommend software suitable for opening or converting such files.
Have a problem opening a .XZ file? We collect information about file formats and can explain what XZ files are. Additionally we recommend software suitable for opening or converting such files.
The .xz filename extension belongs to the XZ Compressed Archive (.xz) file format and type. XZ is the name of an open data compression algorithm, a derivative of the earlier LZMA format, that originated within The Tukaani Project (formerly a Slackware-based GNU/Linux distribution). Like LZMA, XZ is integer-based and allows to achieve very high compression ratios. XZ is closely related to the open-source 7-Zip archive manager and the LZMA SDK (public domain).
An .xz file is an XZ compressed archive. XZ archives are natively handled by XZ Utils (formerly, LZMA Utils) which are the reference XZ implementation, available on a range of platforms and OS'es. On Microsoft Windows, several free and paid archive managers additionally support the XZ format and are capable of handling .xz files.
XZ supports single-file compression only, which is why it is often used in conjunction with TAR. In that case, a .tar archive ('tarball') is used to consolidate files and directories into a single file, whereupon that file is compressed with the XZ method (.tar.xz or .txz). Both XZ and TAR are more commonly used on Unix-style OS'es like FreeBSD and GNU/Linux.