xzcat

View contents of an xz compressed file

$ xzcat [file.xz]

$ xzcat [file.lzma]

$ xzcat [file.xz] | grep "[pattern]"

$ xzcat -t [file.xz]

$ xzcat -v [file.xz]

$ xzcat [file1.xz] [file2.xz]

xzcat [options] [file ...]

xzcat decompresses .xz and .lzma files and writes the uncompressed data to standard output. It is equivalent to running xz --decompress --stdout or xz -dc.
The XZ format uses LZMA2 compression algorithm and provides better compression ratios than gzip or bzip2, though at the cost of slower compression speed. Decompression is relatively fast.
xzcat reads from standard input if no files are specified or if - is given as a filename.

-f, --force

Force decompression even if input doesn't appear to be in .xz format.

Keep input files (they're not deleted anyway with xzcat).

Test compressed file integrity without outputting data.

Suppress warnings and non-fatal error messages.

Display filename and statistics during processing.

Set memory usage limit for decompression.

Restrict to specific format: xz, lzma, raw, auto.

Display help message and exit.

Display version information and exit.

xzcat only decompresses; it cannot handle tar archives (use tar -xJf for .tar.xz files). Memory usage can be significant for files compressed with high settings; use --memlimit to control this. The command is part of XZ Utils, which had a security incident in 2024 affecting versions 5.6.0-5.6.1.

xzcat is part of XZ Utils, developed by Lasse Collin and first released in 2009 as a successor to LZMA Utils. The .xz format was designed to replace .lzma with better features including integrity checking (CRC32/CRC64/SHA-256). XZ Utils became widely adopted as the standard compression tool for software distribution, particularly for Linux kernel and distribution tarballs.

xz(1), unxz(1), zcat(1), bzcat(1), lzcat(1)