pigz

pigz is a parallel implementation of gzip that takes advantage of modern multi-core systems to compress data much faster than traditional gzip while maintaining full compatibility with the gzip format and command-line interface.

Features

• Parallel compression using multiple processors and cores
• Full gzip compatibility with identical format
• Portable across Unix-style operating systems
• Drop-in replacement for gzip with compatible command-line options
• Supports stdin and stdout for piping
• Leverages zlib for compression
• Threading support via pthread libraries

Basic usage

# Compress a file with all available cores.
pigz file.txt

# Compress with a specific number of threads.
pigz -p 4 file.txt

# Decompress a gzip file.
pigz -d file.txt.gz

# Compress and pipe to another process.
cat data.txt | pigz | ssh remote 'cat | pigz -d > data.txt'

Performance

pigz is significantly faster than gzip on multi-core systems because it divides the input into chunks and compresses them in parallel. On systems with many cores, this can provide substantial speedup compared to single-threaded gzip.