How to use zstd compression tool

This note was created on 2020-01-04
This note was last edited on 2023-01-31

Zstandard (or zstd) is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook and published under dual license - BSD + GPLv2. "zstd" is the reference implementation in C. "zstd" decompression is ~1300% faster then "xz", so even Arch Linux decided to use it in main package compression scheme [1].
You can read more about Zstandard here: https://facebook.github.io/zstd
Source code available at GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/zstd

=== Usage ===
Compress a file into a new file with the ".zst" extension: 
$ zstd file

Decompress a file: 
$ zstd -d file.zst

Decompress a file to stdout: 
$ zstd -dc file.zst

Display information about a compressed file:
$ zstd -l file.zst

Compress a file, while specifying the compression level (0 being worst, 19 best, and 3 default). For example, level 7: 
$ zstd -7 file

Use even higher compression levels 20+ (maximum 22), using a lot more memory:
$ zstd --ultra -22 file

Compress using # working threads (default: 1). If # is 0, attempt to detect and use the number of physical CPU cores:
$ zstd -T0 filename

=== Aliases ===
- "zstdmt" is equivalent to "zstd -T0"
- "unzstd" is equivalent to "zstd -d"
- "zstdcat" is equivalent to "zstd -dcf"

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[1] According to a post on https://www.archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression