Libarchive is an open-source BSD-licensed C programming library that provides streaming access to a variety of different archive formats, including tar, cpio, pax, Zip, and ISO9660 images. The distribution also includes bsdtar and bsdcpio, full-featured implementations of tar and cpio that use libarchive. When reading archives, libarchive uses a robust automatic format detector that can automatically handle archives that have been compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, lzip, and several other popular compression algorithms.