zstd

zstd is a command line tool for data compression and decompression, developed by Facebook. It focuses on providing high compression ratio and efficient processing speed.

With zstd, users can compress both individual files and entire directories. It supports a wide range of file formats, including text, images, audio, and video.

The tool offers various compression levels, ranging from ultra-fast to maximum compression, allowing users to choose the trade-off between speed and size reduction. It also supports multi-threading, enabling compression and decompression to be performed in parallel.

zstd uses a modern compression algorithm based on finite state entropy (FSE) and Huffman coding, which achieves excellent compression ratios, often surpassing other popular compression tools like gzip and bzip2.

The command line options of zstd are extensive, providing users with flexibility and control over the compression process. Users can specify compression levels, dictionary sizes, and various other parameters to optimize compression performance.

In addition to compression, zstd also supports decompression of zstd-compressed files. It can efficiently decompress files with both the zstd file extension (.zst) and files without an extension.

zstd is available as an open-source tool, released under a permissive license, which encourages its use and integration into various applications. It supports multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.

Being widely adopted, zstd is integrated into many popular software and platforms, including Apache Hadoop, Linux kernel, and various backup and archiving tools.

The tool provides a rich set of features, including the ability to compress and decompress in memory, as well as streaming compression and decompression. This makes it suitable for many real-time and big data processing scenarios.

Overall, zstd is a versatile and powerful command line tool that offers efficient compression and decompression capabilities, making it a valuable tool for various use cases and environments.