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tar-1.3.1 added support for zstd with the option `--zstd` and `-a`, the auto-decompression flag, also supports zstd. Older tar versions also have the `-I` flag which you can use to (de)compress with zstd.

We're working to improve zstd support in the ecosystem over time, but this work moves slowly, and it takes a long time for upstream work to make it to users systems, especially LTS systems.

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> tar-1.3.1 added support for zstd with the option `--zstd` [...]

Is there a way to pass options to zstd when used like this?

Last time I checked zstd does not support getting options from an environment variable (unlike .e.g. gzip).

With a new enough version of tar you can pass a command with arguments to '-I' (e.g. `tar -I 'zstd -19' ...`).

The alternative is piping the output from tar through zstd yourself.

I build my own custom tar 1.32 rpm with zstd support https://community.centminmod.com/threads/custom-tar-archiver... and can confirm you can pass options that way.

Starting with zstd-1.3.8 we support the `ZSTD_CLEVEL` environment variable. We've started with a small scope for the variable, because we don't want users to unexpectedly remove the source fie, for instance.

If you want to pass extra options, you can pipe the output to zstd, which is exactly what tar is doing internally.

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