xzcompressed

xzcompressed is a descriptive label used in documentation and software to indicate that data has been compressed with the XZ format. It is not a formal file type in itself, but rather a property that identifies the compression method used on a file or stream.

XZ is a lossless compression format based on the LZMA2 algorithm and is accompanied by a container format that provides headers, checksums, and metadata. XZ typically achieves high compression ratios, especially on larger text and binary data, at the cost of greater CPU usage compared with older formats such as gzip.

Files compressed with XZ commonly use the .xz extension, and multiple packaging styles exist. A single file can be compressed to .xz, or a tar archive can be compressed with XZ to produce .tar.xz (often shown with the extension .txz). Decompression tools read the container and restore the original data.

Support and tools: XZ Utils provides xz and unxz commands for compression and decompression; tar supports --xz to create tar.xz archives; most modern Linux distributions include XZ Utils by default, and Windows tools such as 7-Zip also support .xz files.

Considerations: XZ offers high compression at the expense of CPU time and memory, and compatibility can be more limited than gzip for cross-platform interchange. For small files or frequent random access, other formats may be more practical.

Related topics include the XZ format, LZMA2, XZ Utils, and tar.xz.