I've come across XZ files more than once, most recently when downloading Kali Linux. It should be a fairly common knowledge now, but some operating systems still don't support is – so I decided to research and to document it.
What is XZ file?
XZ is a modern lossless compression algorithm, it's more efficient that gzip and bzip2. Apparently, many Linux distros are using XZ for compressing their software packages or ISO images. XZ is an open-source format maintained via Tukaani Project – XZ.
Support for XZ in tar
Modern Linux distros (certainly Ubuntu 19.x and CentOS 7.x when I checked today) have xz utils package installed, which allows tar command to automatically unpack XZ files.
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