7-Zip is a file archiver with highest compression ratio. p7zip is a port of 7za.exe for POSIX systems.

The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system.

This package contains the command line utilities for the ALSA project.

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations.

The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations.

Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will appear in the GNU operating system. Bash is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh). It is intended to conform to the IEEE POSIX P1003.2/ISO 9945.2 Shell and Tools standard. It offers functional improvements over sh for both programming and interactive use. In addition, most sh scripts can be run by Bash without modification.

Oracle Berkeley DB is a family of open source, embeddable databases that allows developers to incorporate within their applications a fast, scalable, transactional database engine with industrial grade reliability and availability.

The BLFS-Bootscripts package contains a set of scripts to start/stop additional services at bootup/shutdown.

Boron is an interpreted, prototype-based, scripting language similar to Rebol. The interpreter and datatype system is a C library useful for building domain specific languages embedded in C/C++ applications.

BZip2 is a freely available, patent free (see below), high-quality data compressor. It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best available techniques (the PPM family of statistical compressors), whilst being around twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression.

OpenSSL no longer includes any root certificates. This package adds root certificates as provided by mozilla.org.

This library offers a visual captcha generation system for REBOL web applications. Its goal is to protect web forms from spam produced by automated bots, using a test that is supposed to be only solvable by a human being.

Cdrtools is a set of command line programs that allows to record CD/DVD/BluRay media. The suite includes the following programs:
    cdrecord - A CD/DVD/BD recording program
    readcd - A program to read CD/DVD/BD media with CD-clone features
    cdda2wav - The most evolved CD-audio extraction program with paranoia support
    mkisofs - A program to create hybrid ISO9660/JOLIET/HFS filesystes with optional Rock Ridge attributes
    isodebug - A program to print mkisofs debug information from media
    isodump - A program to dump ISO-9660 media
    isoinfo - A program to analyse/verify ISO/9660/Joliet/Rock-Ridge Filesystems
    isovfy - A program to verify the ISO-9660 structures
    rscsi - A Remote SCSI enabling daemon
Cdrtools is under constant free and open development since February 1996. The goal for cdrtools development is to permanently provide a free suite of programs for writing CD/DVD/BD media and succeeding similar products (like e.g. HD-DVD).

Cheyenne is a full-featured Apache-class web server implementation using 100% native REBOL. The project started just as a simple rewrite of the UniServe's HTTPd service to make it more flexible and ended as creating Cheyenne. Cheyenne is built on top of the UniServe async network framework, so it inherits the gains of asynchronous I/O and mono-process lightweight design.

The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system. These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.

cURL groks URLs.

CURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP. CURL supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts release 1.10. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters, while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development.

The Ext2 Filesystem Utilities (e2fsprogs) contain all of the standard utilities for creating, fixing, configuring , and debugging ext2 filesystems. They also supports the ext3 and ext4 filesystems.

The GNU Find Utilities are the basic directory searching utilities of the GNU operating system. These programs are typically used in conjunction with other programs to provide modular and powerful directory search and file locating capabilities to other commands.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

This project aims to provide a set of free outline (PostScript Type0, TrueType, OpenType...) fonts covering the ISO 10646/Unicode UCS (Universal Character Set).

FreeType 2 is a software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images). It can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, and many other products as well.

Ghostscript is a package of software that provides:
    - An interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language, with the ability to convert PostScript language files to many raster formats, view them on displays, and print them on printers that don't have PostScript language capability built in;
    - An interpreter for Portable Document Format (PDF) files, with the same abilities;
    - The ability to convert PostScript language files to PDF (with some limitations) and vice versa; and
    - A set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement the graphics and filtering (data compression / decompression / conversion) capabilities that appear as primitive operations in the PostScript language and in PDF.

Giflib is a library for reading and writing gif images. It is API and ABI compatible with libungif which was in wide use while the LZW compression algorithm was patented.

Provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.

The grep command searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines.

THE groff (GNU roff) software is a typesetting package which reads plain text mixed with formatting commands and produces formatted output.

High quality drivers for Canon, Epson, Lexmark, Sony, Olympus, and PCL printers for use with CUPS, Ghostscript, Foomatic, and GIMP.

GNU zip is a popular data compression program written by Jean-loup Gailly for the GNU project. Mark Adler wrote the decompression part. We developed this program as a replacement for compress because of the Unisys and IBM patents covering the LZW algorithm used by compress. These patents made it impossible for us to use compress, and we needed a replacement. The superior compression ratio of gzip is just a bonus.

Inetutils is a collection of common network programs. It includes: an ftp client and server, a telnet client and server, an rsh client and server, an rlogin client and server, a tftp client and server and much more. Most of them are improved versions of programs originally from BSD. Some others are original versions, written from scratch.

Iproute2 is a collection of utilities for controlling TCP / IP networking and traffic control in Linux.

Most network configuration manuals still refer to ifconfig and route as the primary network configuration tools, but ifconfig is known to behave inadequately in modern network environments. They should be deprecated, but most distros still include them. Most network configuration systems make use of ifconfig and thus provide a limited feature set. The /etc/net project aims to support most modern network technologies, as it doesn't use ifconfig and allows a system administrator to make use of all iproute2 features, including traffic control.

Iproute2 consists of several tools, of which the most important are ip and tc. ip controls IPv4 and IPv6 configuration and tc stands for traffic control. Both tools print detailed usage messages and are accompanied by a set of manpages.

IPTables is the userspace command line program used to configure the Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x IPv4 packet filtering ruleset. It is targeted towards system administrators. Since Network Address Translation is also configured from the packet filter ruleset, iptables is used for this, too. The iptables package also includes ip6tables. ip6tables is used for configuring the IPv6 packet filter.

QEMU Accelerator (KQEMU) is a driver allowing the QEMU PC emulator to run much faster when emulating a PC on an x86 host. KQEMU is supported on x86 or x86_64 Linux 2.4 or 2.6 hosts.

LCD (and its variants) is an upper-case-only typeface.  The lower-case characters are identical to the upper-case characters, with the exception of the letters "J", "M", "W", and "Y".  To see the difference between the upper- and lower-case symbols, enter the alphabet in both upper- and lower-case in your word processor, and set the font to LCD. I recommend that you use either all upper-case or all lower-case characters with this font.

Less is a free, open-source file pager. It can be found on most versions of Linux, Unix and Mac OS, as well as on many other operating systems.

Less is a program similar to more, but which allows backward movement in the file as well as forward movement. Also, less does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so with large input files it starts up faster than text editors like vi. Less uses termcap (or terminfo on some systems), so it can run on a variety of terminals. There is even limited support for hardcopy terminals.

The LFS-Bootscripts package contains a set of scripts to start/stop the LFS system at bootup/shutdown.

Sans, Serif and Mono replacement fonts for similar proprietary fonts.

There are three sets: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono).

Widely used free library for JPEG image compression.

This package contains C software to implement JPEG image encoding, decoding, and transcoding. JPEG (pronounced "jay-peg") is a standardized compression method for full-color and gray-scale images.

This software implements JPEG baseline, extended-sequential, and progressive compression processes. Provision is made for supporting all variants of these processes, although some uncommon parameter settings aren't implemented yet. We have made no provision for supporting the hierarchical or lossless processes defined in the standard.

Ogg is a multimedia container format, and the native file and stream format for the Xiph.org multimedia codecs. As with all Xiph.org technology it is an open format free for anyone to use.

As with most container formats it encapsulates raw compressed data and allows the interleaving of audio and video data inside a single convenient format. Other examples of container formats are Quicktime .mov, the MPEG program stream, and AVI.

Ogg is a stream oriented container, meaning it can be written and read in one pass, making it a natural fit for internet streaming and use in processing pipelines. This stream orientation is the major design difference over other file-based container formats.

This is an open source project to develop and maintain the reference library for use in applications that read, create, and manipulate PNG (Portable Network Graphics) raster image files.

Theora is a free and open video compression format from the Xiph.org Foundation. Like all our multimedia technology it can be used to distribute film and video online and on disc without the licensing and royalty fees or vendor lock-in associated with other formats.

Theora scales from postage stamp to HD resolution, and is considered particularly competitive at low bitrates. It is in the same class as MPEG-4/DiVX, and like the Vorbis audio codec it has lots of room for improvement as encoder technology develops.

GNU libTool is a generic library support script. LibTool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a consistent, portable interface.

Library for use by user level applications to access USB devices regardless of OS.

Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.

Links is a web browser running in both graphics and text mode.

Linux is a clone of the Unix kernel, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance. It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix kernel, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and TCP/IP networking.

Luxi fonts by Bigelow & Holmes Inc.

GNU Midnight Commander is a visual file manager. It's a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included.

Midnight Commander is based on versatile text interfaces, such as Ncurses or S-Lang, which allows it to work on a regular console, inside an X Window terminal, over SSH connections and all kinds of remote shells.

MIME files 'mime.types'.

Mktemp is a small program to allow safe temporary file creation from shell scripts.

MSNTP can be used as a SNTP client to query a NTP or SNTP server and either display the time or set the local system's time (given suitable privilege). It can be run as an interactive command, in a cron job or as a daemon. It can be run as a daemon to provide a SNTP server for other clients.

The Ncurses (new curses) library is a free software emulation of curses in System V Release 4.0, and more. It uses Terminfo format, supports pads and color and multiple highlights and forms characters and function-key mapping, and has all the other SYSV-curses enhancements over BSD Curses.

Netcat is a simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH connectivity tools that technical users of the Internet rely on. Users of telnet, rlogin, and ftp may not realise that their password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions.

The OpenSSH suite replaces rlogin and telnet with the ssh program, rcp with scp, and ftp with sftp. Also included is sshd (the server side of the package), and the other utilities like ssh-add, ssh-agent, ssh-keysign, ssh-keyscan, ssh-keygen and sftp-server.

The OpenSSL Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library.

The Urlan Project is an exploration of language oriented programming using small run-time environments. There are currently two related sub-projects: Orca & Thune. These are interpreted, homoiconic languages, which are well suited for embedding domain specific languages.
Orca closely emulates the REBOL language. The interpreter is a C library so that C/C++ applications can use Orca as an embedded scripting system.

Finally a networked multiplayer game in the vein of the puzzle classic Bust a Move/Puzzle Bobble! Beat your friends in this addictive game, or play against a random opponent! Remember to sign up to participate in the score system.

Pkg-config is a helper tool used when compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line so an application can use gcc -o test test.c `pkg-config --libs --cflags glib-2.0` for instance, rather than hard-coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries). It is language-agnostic, so it can be used for defining the location of documentation tools, for instance.

QEMU is a generic machine emulator and virtualiser.

When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance.

When used as a virtualiser, QEMU achieves near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. A host driver called the QEMU accelerator (also known as KQEMU) is needed in this case.

QuarterMaster is a web framework based on the 'Model-View-Controller' application pattern. It is written in REBOL and is designed 1) to have as small a footprint as it can get away with, 2) to install without effort, 3) to leverage the highly expressive REBOL messaging language.

The GNU Readline library provides a set of functions for use by applications that allow users to edit command lines as they are typed in. Both Emacs and vi editing modes are available. The Readline library includes additional functions to maintain a list of previously-entered command lines, to recall and perhaps reedit those lines, and perform csh-like history expansion on previous commands.

The history facilities are also placed into a separate library, the History library, as part of the build process. The History library may be used without Readline in applications which desire its capabilities.

REBOL uses "relative expressions" (context dependent dialects) to create a powerful new dimension similar to that found in natural human languages.

REBOL provides a lightweight platform for Internet applications. REBOL's power makes applications small so they are less expensive to create, distribute, maintain, and upgrade. In the size of a typical web page, you can fit an entire REBOL application.

REBOL/Core is the kernel of the REBOL distributed computing platform. Designed for the semantic exchange and interpretation of information REBOL/Core is the engine that powers all REBOL products. REBOL/Core provides system-independent code, a common data model, compression, and more than a dozen Internet protocols built-in.

This driver will allow you to connect to a MySQL database server, send queries and retrieve resulting recordsets. This driver is 100% written in REBOL and doesn't require any additional library (like libmysql). It works with all REBOL products and on all platforms supported by REBOL. You only need one file to make it work and its size is less than 30KB. It works by adding a new scheme (mysql://) that enables any REBOL product to talk to a MySQL server.

REBOL/Services implements network services - similar in concept to web services, but extremely lightweight by comparison. The design provides an easy way to send requests to REBOL-based services on the Internet. It is also possible to create gateways to other types of services.

REBOL/Services provides a simple, elegant way to share information between computer programs. They can be used to exchange information between clients and servers that are located thousands of miles apart or simply between applications running on your local computer.

REBOL/Services implements a concept called a service oriented architecture or SOA for short. The basic idea of an SOA is that you send a request message to another program (a "service") that attempts to fulfill the request and return the result.

A programmer's best friend.

Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.

S-Lang is a multi-platform programmer's library designed to allow a developer to create robust multi-platform software. It provides facilities required by interactive applications such as display/screen management, keyboard input, keymaps, and so on. The most exciting feature of the library is the slang interpreter that may be easily embedded into a program to make it extensible. While the emphasis has always been on the embedded nature of the interpreter, it may also be used in a stand-alone fashion through the use of slsh, which is part of the S-Lang distribution.

S3Cmd is a Ruby program that wraps S3 operations into a simple command-line tool. It is inspired by things like rsh3ll, #sh3ll, etc., but shares no code from them.

S3Sync is a Ruby program that easily transfers directories between a local directory and an S3 bucket:prefix. It behaves somewhat, but not precisely, like the RSync program.

In general, s3sync and s3cmd complement each other. s3sync is useful to perform serious synchronization operations, and s3cmd allows you to do simple things such as bucket management, listing, transferring single files, and the like.

SANE stands for "Scanner Access Now Easy" and is an application programming interface (API) that provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware (flatbed scanner, hand-held scanner, video- and still-cameras, frame-grabbers, etc.).

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games.

SDL_image is an image file loading library. It loads images as SDL surfaces, and supports the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, LBM, PCX, PNG, PNM, TGA, TIFF, XCF, XPM, XV.

SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and SMPEG MP3 libraries.

This is a small sample cross-platform networking library.

SDL_sound is a library that handles the decoding of several popular sound file formats, such as .WAV and .MP3. It is meant to make the programmer's sound playback tasks simpler. The programmer gives SDL_sound a filename, or feeds it data directly from one of many sources, and then reads the decoded waveform data back at her leisure. If resource constraints are a concern, SDL_sound can process sound data in programmer-specified blocks. Alternately, SDL_sound can decode a whole sound file and hand back a single pointer to the whole waveform. SDL_sound can also handle sample rate, audio format, and channel conversion on-the-fly and behind-the-scenes, if the programmer desires.

This is a sample library which allows you to use TrueType fonts in your SDL applications. It comes with an example program "showfont" which displays an example string for a given TrueType font file.

Sed (streams editor) isn't really a true text editor or text processor. Instead, it is used to filter text, i.e., it takes text input and performs some operation (or set of operations) on it and outputs the modified text. Sed is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.

Suite of system tools for managing user passwords.

SPLint is an extended implementation of the "lint" C code checker.

SpliX is a set of CUPS printer drivers for SPL (Samsung Printer Language) printers. If you have such a printer, you need to use SpliX. This driver is usable by all printer devices which understand the QPDL (Quick Page Description Language) language. It covers several Samsung, Xerox, Dell and Ricoh printers like the ML-2250 which uses it as a native printer language.

Sudo (su "do") allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.

The Tar program provides the ability to create tar archives, as well as various other kinds of manipulation. For example, you can use Tar on previously created archives to extract files, to store additional files, or to update or list files which were already stored.

Initially, tar archives were used to store files conveniently on magnetic tape. The name "Tar" comes from this use; it stands for tape archiver. Despite the utility's name, Tar can direct its output to available devices, files, or other programs (using pipes), it can even access remote devices or files (as archives).

This is the GNU termcap library -- a library of C functions that enable programs to send control strings to terminals in a way independent of the terminal type. The GNU termcap library does not place an arbitrary limit on the size of termcap entries, unlike most other termcap libraries. However, the current version contains some entries that are more than 1023 bytes long, which is the largest value that is safe to use with the many historical applications that only allocate a 1024 byte termcap buffer (telnet, for example). Use of termcap is discouraged. Termcap is being phased out in favor of the terminfo-based ncurses library, which contains an emulation of the termcap library routines in addition to an excellent curses implementation.

TINY Is Not YAML. Parses and manipulates strings, text files and data objects in directory hierarchies.

Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client with a focus on being lightweight yet feature-filled. On Syllable, currently only the text-mode version is available.

UDev allows Linux users to have a dynamic /dev directory and it provides the ability to have persistent device names.

UniServe is a client/server network programming framework for REBOL. It has been designed and built in order to offer a high performance network engine while providing a simple and consistent API for developers. If you want to implement a client or server or both (in the same application) in REBOL, UniServe will be a perfect fit and will save you days of hard work on low-level I/O routines. Additionally, UniServe is published with several useful services (HTTPd, Proxy, Task-Master,...) and client protocols (HTTP, POP3, DNS, ...) to help you build your product even faster.

UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format (also called "zipfiles"). Although highly compatible both with PKWARE's PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS and with Info-ZIP's own Zip program, the primary objectives have been portability and non-MSDOS functionality.

The Util-linux-ng package contains miscellaneous utility programs. Among them are utilities for handling file systems, consoles, partitions, and messages.

The util-linux-ng is a fork of the original util-linux project. The goal of the util-linux-ng is a transparent and reliable development that follows the Linux kernel and Linux distributions.

The Wireless Extension (WE) is a generic API allowing a driver to expose to the user space configuration and statistics specific to common Wireless LANs. The beauty of it is that a single set of tool can support all the variations of Wireless LANs, regardless of their type (as long as the driver support Wireless Extension). Another advantage is these parameters may be changed on the fly without restarting the driver (or Linux).

The Wireless Tools (WT) is a set of tools allowing to manipulate the Wireless Extensions. They use a textual interface and are rather crude, but aim to support the full Wireless Extension. There are many other tools you can use with Wireless Extensions, however Wireless Tools is the reference implementation.

XZ Utils is free general-purpose data compression software with high compression ratio. XZ Utils were written for POSIX-like systems (GNU/Linux, *BSDs, etc.), but also work on some not-so-POSIX systems like Windows. XZ Utils are the successor to LZMA Utils.

The core of the XZ Utils compression code is based on LZMA SDK, but it has been modified quite a lot to be suitable for XZ Utils. The primary compression algorithm is currently LZMA2, which is used inside the .xz container format. With typical files, XZ Utils create 30 % smaller output than gzip and 15 % smaller output than bzip2.

XZ Utils consist of several components:
- liblzma is a compression library with API similar to that of zlib.
- xz is a command line tool with syntax similar to that of gzip.
- xzdec is a decompression-only tool smaller than the full-featured xz tool.
- A set of shell scripts (xzgrep, xzdiff, etc.) have been adapted from gzip to ease viewing, grepping, and comparing compressed files.
- Emulation of command line tools of LZMA Utils eases transition from LZMA Utils to XZ Utils.

While liblzma has a zlib-like API, liblzma doesn't include any file I/O functions. A separate I/O library is planned, which would abstract handling of .gz, .bz2, and .xz files with an easy to use API.

Zip is a compression and file packaging/archive utility. Although highly compatible both with PKWARE's PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS and with Info-ZIP's own UnZip, the primary objectives have been portability and other-than-MSDOS functionality.

A Massively Spiffy Yet Delicately Unobtrusive Compression Library.

Zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered -- that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The zlib data format is itself portable across platforms. Unlike the LZW compression method used in Unix compress(1) and in the GIF image format, the compression method currently used in zlib essentially never expands the data. (LZW can double or triple the file size in extreme cases.) zlib's memory footprint is also independent of the input data and can be reduced, if necessary, at some cost in compression.

The compression algorithm used in zlib is essentially the same as that in gzip and Zip, namely, the `deflate' method that originated in PKWARE's PKZIP 2.x.