1 .TH libbz2 3 "8 Oct 1999"
3 libbz2 \- library for block-sorting data compression
7 .RI "[ " "flag " \|.\|.\|. ] " "file \|.\|.\|."
9 .RI "[ " "library" " \|.\|.\|. ]"
18 Interfaces in this library provide the ability to compress (and
19 decompress) files using the Burrows-Wheeler blocksorting text compression
20 algorithm, and Huffman coding. It is provided along with the
27 The source distribution of bzip2 contains a description of how to
28 use this library in HTML form.
30 For additional information on shared object interfaces, see
47 BZ2_bzBuffToBuffCompress
48 BZ2_bzBuffToBuffDecompress
63 /usr/lib/64/libbz2.so.1
69 Julian Seward, jseward@acm.org.
71 http://sourceware.cygnus.com/bzip2
72 http://www.muraroa.demon.co.uk
74 The ideas embodied in bzip2 are due to (at least) the fol-
75 lowing people: Michael Burrows and David Wheeler (for the
76 block sorting transformation), David Wheeler (again, for
77 the Huffman coder), Peter Fenwick (for the structured cod-
78 ing model in the original bzip, and many refinements), and
79 Alistair Moffat, Radford Neal and Ian Witten (for the
80 arithmetic coder in the original bzip). I am much
81 indebted for their help, support and advice. See the man-
82 ual in the source distribution for pointers to sources of
83 documentation. Christian von Roques encouraged me to look
84 for faster sorting algorithms, so as to speed up compres-
85 sion. Bela Lubkin encouraged me to improve the worst-case
86 compression performance. Many people sent patches, helped
87 with portability problems, lent machines, gave advice and
88 were generally helpful.