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4 File format
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but
when there is no longer anything to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In the diagram below, a box like this:
+---+ | | <-- the vertical bars might be missing +---+
represents one byte; a box like this:
+==============+ | | +==============+
represents a variable number of bytes.
A lzip file consists of a series of "members" (compressed data sets). The members simply appear one after another in the file, with no additional information before, between, or after them.
Each member has the following structure:
+--+--+--+--+----+----+=============+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | ID string | VN | DS | Lzma stream | CRC32 | Data size | Member size | +--+--+--+--+----+----+=============+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
All multibyte values are stored in little endian order.
- ‘ID string’
A four byte string, identifying the lzip format, with the value "LZIP" (0x4C, 0x5A, 0x49, 0x50).
- ‘VN (version number, 1 byte)’
Just in case something needs to be modified in the future. 1 for now.
- ‘DS (coded dictionary size, 1 byte)’
Lzip divides the distance between any two powers of 2 into 8 equally spaced intervals, named "wedges". The dictionary size is calculated by taking a power of 2 (the base size) and substracting from it a number of wedges between 0 and 7. The size of a wedge is (base_size / 16).
Bits 4-0 contain the base 2 logarithm of the base size (12 to 29).
Bits 7-5 contain the number of wedges (0 to 7) to substract from the base size to obtain the dictionary size.
Example: 0xD3 = 2^19 - 6 * 2^15 = 512 KiB - 6 * 32 KiB = 320 KiB
Valid values for dictionary size range from 4 KiB to 512 MiB.- ‘Lzma stream’
The lzma stream, finished by an end of stream marker. Uses default values for encoder properties. See the chapter ‘Stream format’ (see section Format of the LZMA stream in lzip files) for a complete description.
- ‘CRC32 (4 bytes)’
CRC of the uncompressed original data.
- ‘Data size (8 bytes)’
Size of the uncompressed original data.
- ‘Member size (8 bytes)’
Total size of the member, including header and trailer. This field acts as a distributed index, allows the verification of stream integrity, and facilitates safe recovery of undamaged members from multi-member files.
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