Parallel gzip and bzip2

It’s great to see parallel versions of core system utilities like gzip and bzip2 popping up. In particular, pigz (pronounced pig-zee) is a drop-in replacement for gzip and lbzip2 and pbzip2 are drop-in replacements for bzip2.

An easy way to use them by default in Linux without messing with the /bin tree is to create symbolic links in /usr/local/bin as follows:

ln -s /usr/bin/lbzip2 /usr/local/bin/bzip2
ln -s /usr/bin/lbzip2 /usr/local/bin/bunzip2
ln -s /usr/bin/lbzip2 /usr/local/bin/bzcat
ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /usr/local/bin/gzip
ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /usr/local/bin/gunzip
ln -s /usr/bin/pigz /usr/local/bin/zcat

As for Debian-Linux-specific instructions, there are packages for all three of these tools:

sudo apt-get install pigz lbzip2 pbzip2

Clearly, these should be made to work with the Debian alternatives system, but that hasn’t happened yet. So, for now it seems the symbolic links above are probably the best bet.

Update 2012–01–27: Laszlo Ersek pointed out that there is a simple way to use symlinks in /usr/bin, where many other scripts and programs will expect gzip and bzip2 to live, without causing problems with the Debian package manager. Specifically, bzip-divert can be used, for example, to relocate /bin/bzip2 to /bin/bzip2.distrib. Then the /bin/bzip2 symlink will be left untouched during upgrades, during which the relocated binary will be updated instead. For more details, Debian Administration has a useful article called “Replacing binaries with dpkg-divert”.