Re: Suggested file extension for tar lzip

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hi Joel,

Joel May wrote:
> I'm working on adding lzip support to Duplicati in the form of .tar.lz
> files.  I need to shorten the file extension down to a single segment.
> Is there an official recommendation for what that file extension should
> be?  Following convention set by other formats (e.g. tgz, txz), it would
> be tlz.  Some places on the internet (i.e. Wikipedia) list tlz as "plain"
> tar LZMA, so that could cause confusion.

Thanks for adding lzip support to Duplicati. :-)

The official recommendation for a single file extension equivalent to 
"tar.lz" is "tlz". As you can see in the manual[1], "lzip -d file.tlz" 
produces a decompressed file named "file.tar".

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzip_manual.html#Introduction

I guess the list of archive formats in the Wikipedia needs an update. Ten 
years ago, it seems that some people recommended "tlz" as equivalent to 
"tar.lzma", but I think the lzma-alone format has been mostly abandoned 
since then because of its defects. See for example the ChangeLog of Slackware:

http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt
  Change .tlz to mean .tar.lz. We never really used the previous definition
  (which was tar.lzma), and .lz is a probably a better format than xz or lzma.

or the description of any archive manager:

http://packages.debian.org/experimental/file-roller
File-roller supports the following formats:
[...] lzip (.tar.lz, .tlz), [...]


Best regards,
Antonio.