diff --git a/src/xz/xz.1 b/src/xz/xz.1 index db96437d..336619e8 100644 --- a/src/xz/xz.1 +++ b/src/xz/xz.1 @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ .\" Authors: Lasse Collin .\" Jia Tan .\" -.TH XZ 1 "2025-01-05" "Tukaani" "XZ Utils" +.TH XZ 1 "2025-03-06" "Tukaani" "XZ Utils" . .SH NAME xz, unxz, xzcat, lzma, unlzma, lzcat \- Compress or decompress .xz and .lzma files @@ -2596,12 +2596,34 @@ all non-options are silently ignored. Parsing is done with .BR getopt_long (3) which is used also for the command line arguments. +.PP +.B Warning: +By setting these environment variables, +one is effectively modifying programs and scripts that run +.BR xz . +Most of the time it is safe to set memory usage limits, number of threads, +and compression options via the environment variables. +However, some options can break scripts subtly or completely. +An obvious example is +.B \-\-help +which makes +.B xz +show the help text instead of compressing or decompressing a file. +A more subtle example is +.B \-\-verbose +which undoes the effect of +.B \-\-quiet +and also affects the behavior of +.BR \-\-list , +thus +.B \-\-verbose +isn't safe to use all the time. .TP .B XZ_DEFAULTS User-specific or system-wide default options. Typically this is set in a shell initialization script to enable .BR xz 's -memory usage limiter by default. +memory usage limiter by default or set the default number of threads. Excluding shell initialization scripts and similar special cases, scripts must never set or unset .BR XZ_DEFAULTS .