┌─ FILE ANALYSIS ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ┐
│ DEVELOPER : Meta (Facebook) / Yann Collet
│ CATEGORY : Archive
│ MIME TYPE : application/zstd
│ MAGIC BYTES : 28B52FFD
└ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ┘
What is a ZST file?
Zstandard (zstd) is a fast lossless compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Meta. It provides compression ratios comparable to zlib while being significantly faster at both compression and decompression. Zstandard has been adopted by major systems including Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, and package managers.
How to open ZST files
- 7-Zip (Windows) — Free, recent versions support zstd
- zstd CLI (Windows, macOS, Linux) —
zstd -d file.zst - tar (Linux) —
tar --zstd -xf archive.tar.zst - PeaZip (Windows, Linux) — Free GUI
Technical specifications
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Algorithm | Zstandard (LZ77 + FSE) |
| Compression Levels | 1-22 (configurable) |
| Speed | 400-500 MB/s compression, 1+ GB/s decompression |
| Dictionary | Trainable dictionaries for small data |
| Standard | RFC 8478, RFC 8878 |
Common use cases
- Package managers: Arch Linux pacman, Fedora RPMs use zstd.
- Databases: PostgreSQL and RocksDB compression.
- Filesystem: Btrfs transparent compression.
- Networking: HTTP content encoding.