I kind of think of OSX as Unix by another name. But, if I need to move this to the Apple forum, please tell me!I can create tar files compressed using lzma as such:  $ ls ./DbDumpsalpha.dmpbeta.dmpdelta.dmp$ XZ_OPT=-9 tar cJf dbDumps.tar.xz DbDumpsBut, what I really want to do ( but cannot ) is compress each individual file, and then create the tar file. for example:$ cd DbDumps$ xz.exe *dmp$ cd ..$ tar cf dbDumps.tar DbDumpsI'm a beginner and don't know where to start. Should I investigate HomeBrew ? XZ.pkg ?  Actually, back in October www.aeyoun.com claimed that Yosemite, other than via tar, does not support *.xz file compression. Is this correct? Might it be that *xz is doable, but Apple just won't say it is officially supported??
Can I use lzma compression, without using tar, on OSX 10.10.3?
files;tar;compression;xz
Of course you can. Firstly tar in most cases does not include compression, it hands that off to a helper (if it supports it at all). At first that helper was compress (.tar.Z). I have also seen gzip (.tar.gz or .tgz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2), infozip's zip and unzip tools (.tar.zip), and some I cant rember the official names for (.tar.lha, .tar.lhz, .tar.zoo, tar.bz, tar.z). All of these use compression separate from tar. so the easy way to do it would be just to find the path to the xz binary (it would be called xz not xz.exe). If it is not already installed on the system, the easiest way would be to install it from a third party repository like macports. And if all else fails you can always install from source (although I cannot imagine that it would come to this).