a regular file.
Sparse file creation can be disabled with --no-sparse.
I don't promise yet that the name of this option won't
change before 5.0.0. It's possible that the code, that
checks when it is safe to use sparse output on stdout,
is not good enough, and a more flexible command line
option is needed to configure sparse file handling.
files as is to standard output.
This feature is needed to be more compatible with gzip's
behavior. This was more complicated to implement than it
sounds, because the way liblzma is able to return errors with
files of only a few bytes in size. xz now has its own file
type detection code and no longer uses lzma_auto_decoder().
