8 ms·

This may be a good place to ask this. Legitimate question, why do people still use WinRAR and 7zip and stuff? Zip is built into literally everything. I don't

This may be a good place to ask this. Legitimate question, why do people still use WinRAR and 7zip and stuff? Zip is built into literally everything. I don't really want to have to download another application to unpack something I get. Is there a good reason? It frequently feels like it's used just to make extra work for the downloader

WorldMaker 3y ago
I use Windows' built-in zip support more often than not, but 7zip is still handy as a "debug tool" when Windows gives up on a zip, or when I know a file is a zip but has a different extension and for whatever reason I don't want to rename it in that moment (skim something out of a DOCX file, for instance). Also, a common gesture I use is 7zip's extensions to the right-click drag file operation. I can select an entire collection of zip files right-click drag it to a different folder and "Extract to *\" which decompresses all the files into a set of folders (under the folder you are dragging into) using the names of the zip files as the folder names (minus the extension). This is a useful and surprisingly common operation. (For instance, downloading a bunch of Bandcamp albums on a Bandcamp Friday and decompressing them all at once to a music library folder.)
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  Further tangent: my company still pays the zombie remains of Corel for WinZIP licenses and that astonishes me. WinZIP is slow and really doesn't seem to offer much over Windows built-in support, plus it still "kindly" clobbers the built-in support (on every reinstall/upgrade) removing it from the default and subtly breaking it (which I find quite irritating). It uselessly bloats Windows File Explorer tooltips and dialogs. (Why do I care what some subset of filenames inside the zip file are?) It doesn't seem to offer any useful tools, and its user interface is ugly, slow, and prone to crashing. WinZIP should probably have died in the 90s.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Because some people, for reasons known only to themselves, still insist on using .tar files in 2023.
xxs 3y ago
>Zip is built into literally everything. Deflate is a 16bit algorithm from '91. Which is slow and the density is low.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Have you ever tried unpacking files with special characters from zip? Like umlauts, etc? Especially between different machines. It produces broken file names. Zip doesn't store access rights, unlike tar. That's why tar gzip is so popular on Linux.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
I'm an old school pirate and have a cracked winrar 6.1 on my PC. It just works. Old habits and all that.
katbyte 3y ago
both provide much better compression then zip, and when you are compressing large amounts of compressible data that is important. i personally use rar (not winrar because i am not on windows) because it also: locks created archive, tests it, and adds a recovery record so if a few bits or even bytes flip it can be recovered. rar also has a ton of options to customize compression like splitting into multiple files (i think 7z does this too as well)
ElectricalUnion 3y ago
> Zip is built into literally everything. I don't really want to have to download another application to unpack something I get. There's a more interesting question lying in there: "Zip is built into literally everything." From my anecdotal evidence with random Windows software, for said support, developers probably bundled 7zip in order to support compressed file formats. Granted, in the end the fact that 7zip is bundled, or if 7zip and it's several features are exposed to you as a end-user is another story.
jccalhoun 3y ago
I use Nanazip which is a version of 7zip with modernization (although its development seems to have slowed considerably so I may switch back to regular 7zip) because I do run into compressed file other than zips. When windows 11 support for rar and 7z comes out I may stop using it.
oefrha 3y ago
You mean the zip feature built into Windows that will refuse to compress if there’s any file with non-Latin1 character in its name, and will garble Unicode filenames compressed on other platforms? No I’m not talking about Windows 2000, it’s the same in Windows 11. For ~half of the world’s population it’s literally useless.
Yournothed 3y ago
RAR is the standard way to distribute warez scene releases. If you're getting your releases from a topsite or other high quality sources, everything will be in RARs. Installing WinRAR is the first thing you do when scening. It's like when you install Windows and install Firefox before doing anything.
senectus1 3y ago
windows built in zip cant handle long paths, or special characters. 7zip is a much more powerful tool
soared 3y ago
Default unzipping in windows requires admin privileges for some reason on my work laptop, so I had IT install winrar so I could unzip without admin access.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Your admins have locked down the temporary directory that the zip routine uses to store extracted files before copying them into the final location. That's the sort of paranoia that breaks a lot of applications in hard to diagnose ways.
gruez 3y ago
You don't occasionally need to open .7z or .tar.gz files?
- ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
  > You don't occasionally need to open .7z I do an I absolutely loathe when something is compressed as 7z.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  I do but I wouldn't if other people didn't put them in that format instead of zip. That said, I know tar.gz is native to linux so that one I understand more than 7z but this thread is showing there are definitely legit uses!
MikusR 3y ago
Recovery records.
jcpham2 3y ago
As a sysadmin, I frequently deploy 7zip via .msi to all machines that I think might even have the slightest use to open archive files. It's not that the OS doesn't support .zip it's that the OS ONLY support .zip out of the box and the OS .zip file manager is inadequate in many troubleshooting scenarios. Sometimes you need to split archives Sometimes you want to open a non-standard file type with something to unpack it (.xlsx/self extracting .exe) Sometimes you've got Software Restriction Policies that prevent standard %temp% extraction installers from running and need to manually extract a package. This is the short list
kwanbix 3y ago
I upvoted you, as people are so intolerant today that downvote anything they don't like, like spoiled kids. It is crazy. That said, RAR and 7zip compress much, much better than ZIP (faster or more).
- chankstein38 3y ago
  Thank you, I was worried about that. I wonder about this a lot and HN always thought like the right place to ask!
rjsw 3y ago
I have been told that 7zip handles long pathnames better than the zip functionality built in to Windows.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
.7z gets way better compression than .zip, in my experience. Plus, 7-zip can handle the odd archive here and there that I'm forced to download on my corporate PC that Windows cannot. Like a tarball. Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful. So to answer your question: there are plenty of legitimate reasons to still use 7zip. I can't think of any legitimate reasons to still use WinRAR, though...
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  > Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful. Ironic, isn't 7-Zip the program where the developer has famously refused to provide download hashes or digital signatures of the release binaries?
- rowbin 3y ago
  Interesting, never heard tarballs being classified as odd before. They are still widely used.
  - Frost1x 3y ago
    If it's something you intend to package to a non-Windows user then sure it's not odd. I send file archives to non-tech users all the time internally. I absolutely do not tarball them, I zip them. When it comes to less tech savvy users, a tarball is definitely an odd format to deal with.
  - AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    If you're a non-developer Windows user, you won't encounter a tarball in the wild very often. I think I first ran into one when I wanted an emulator in the early aughts (as a teenager) and found it on Sourceforge. My immediate thoughts were, "What the hell is this?" and "Why didn't they just give me an EXE?"
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  One advantage of WinRAR over 7-Zip is the option to add recovery data and data parity recovery files. This can of course be accomplished on any file using PAR2 but it saved a step which some people liked. Not everyone needs this option. I create PAR files when I back up important archives to multiple external drives. par2cmdline [1] is in some Linux repositories. [1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline [In need of a new maintainer]
jsheard 3y ago
Microsoft is (finally) adding native support for tar/gz/bz2/rar/7z (edit: and xz/zstd) to Windows, so third party apps shouldn't be required for much longer. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/08/18/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22621-2199-and-22631-2199-beta-channel/ https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/08/18/announc... It's only available on the preview channel for now but it's coming.
- tssva 3y ago
  Command line support for these formats has existed in Windows for multiple years via bsdtar which has shipped with Windows for quite a while now.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Huh ? Parent was talking about bz2, xz.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - tssva 3y ago
      The comment originally mentioned tar/gz/bz2/rar/7z support being added to Windows. bsdtar supports all of these.
      - andrewf 3y ago
        bsdtar is backed by libarchive, which supports all the formats listed at https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveFormats https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...
- xxpor 3y ago
  Have they added lz4 and xz as well?
jabroni_salad 3y ago
winrar is really good if you wish to split a big file into smaller chunks, since it has parity features.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
specproc 3y ago
IIRC there was some issue with non-Latin characters in filenames in zips on older Windows. The details escape me, but I live somewhere with a non-Latin script and it rars were very popular here ten-fifteen years ago for this reason.
- Nyan 3y ago
  Many older formats, ZIP included, didn't standardise on an encoding, so they just use whatever the local 8-bit encoding happens to be. And if your system charset is different from the ZIP creator's, you could get messed up filenames. This is just another cost of sticking to legacy formats.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  That's interesting! I feel like I've run into that as well pulling down a repo or something at some point!
CJefferson 3y ago
Rar seems to handle Chinese filenames much better than zip.
coolfission 3y ago
Probably because all those youtubers say to download WinRAR to extract files so people don't know that there's better alternatives. I also recommend NanaZip (a fork of 7zip) instead of 7zip since it integrates better with Windows 11 context menu.
nonethewiser 3y ago
It's been a few years since I daily-drove windows but I remember that I used 7zip sometimes because the native zip didn't work at times. As I recall I ran into issues with it failing on deeply nested files.
dataflow 3y ago
WinRAR has way more useful options available than 7-zip. Like adding a recovery record, storing certain file extensions without compression, etc.
msla 3y ago
I wonder how much of Windows' profusion of archive formats is a hangover from the MS-DOS archiver wars.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
7zip is great if you are zipping up your own data. RAR is used on the internet because large files get broken up into smaller parts to get transferred and you can use RAR to determine whether your compressed fileset is legitimate or if it needs repair. That's where recovery volumes come in. If it won't unrar, then you can just add enough recovery files until it does.
antihero 3y ago
Any reason that LZMA support isn't build into Windows? I think there's maybe some licensing issues with RAR perhaps.
HPsquared 3y ago
I find 7-zip is a lot faster than the Windows Explorer Zip handler.
- ok123456 3y ago
  That's because it supports multicore by default.
izackp 3y ago
7zip supports aes-256 encryption on zip files. Windows does not.
tredre3 3y ago
I use WinRAR because 7zip's handling of tar.gz/bz is abysmal. It first opens the .gz so you have a list containing the tar. Then you can double click the tar to browse it, but it will need to extract it fully to the temp folder first. WinRAR opens a .tar.gz like any other single-format archive (zip, rar, 7z) so it's much much faster, but also more intuitive. Even though I use WinRAR, I only create ZIPs for compatibility with others. I would also stick to ZIPs if I were to use 7zip.
dogleash 3y ago
7Zip - the tool not the format - is about as unobtrusive to use as it gets, supports every archive format we deal with on a regular basis, has a very tolerable license and provides better feedback than explorer's zip. It also handles our zip files that explorer is known to choke on. And because we can assume everyone in the office has 7zip, we don't have to create zips for things that go between windows and linux systems.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >unobtrusive We are talking about the program that adds like four options to the right click menu throughout your entire system right?
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Arguably very useful options. For instance, try using 7zip to extract an .exe installer sometime -- right click on it and extract it into its own dir and see what is in it.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    In the submenu. And it's useful not to wrestle with the unregistered filetypes or just RMB on some .exe to be able to unpack it.
  - ls612 3y ago
    I've used 7zip for a decade and just a couple months ago I discovered in addition to everything I knew about already it also offers it also has a SHA-256 checksum tool in it's context menu! It is legitimately one of the most useful utilities on my system.
  - OGWhales 3y ago
    You can choose what shows up in that context menu or choose to show nothing at all, you can also choose to have it cascade (which I believe is the default).
josefresco 3y ago
.RAR file support The Windows zip tool failed just yesterday because some of my file names had illegal characters yet 7zip/winrar handled it no problem. Better compression / more options Beyond that, there's not much I need it for but every time I remove it ... I end up needed it shortly!

WorldMaker 3y ago

I use Windows' built-in zip support more often than not, but 7zip is still handy as a "debug tool" when Windows gives up on a zip, or when I know a file is a zip but has a different extension and for whatever reason I don't want to rename it in that moment (skim something out of a DOCX file, for instance). Also, a common gesture I use is 7zip's extensions to the right-click drag file operation. I can select an entire collection of zip files right-click drag it to a different folder and "Extract to *\" which decompresses all the files into a set of folders (under the folder you are dragging into) using the names of the zip files as the folder names (minus the extension). This is a useful and surprisingly common operation. (For instance, downloading a bunch of Bandcamp albums on a Bandcamp Friday and decompressing them all at once to a music library folder.)

WorldMaker 3y ago
Further tangent: my company still pays the zombie remains of Corel for WinZIP licenses and that astonishes me. WinZIP is slow and really doesn't seem to offer much over Windows built-in support, plus it still "kindly" clobbers the built-in support (on every reinstall/upgrade) removing it from the default and subtly breaking it (which I find quite irritating). It uselessly bloats Windows File Explorer tooltips and dialogs. (Why do I care what some subset of filenames inside the zip file are?) It doesn't seem to offer any useful tools, and its user interface is ugly, slow, and prone to crashing. WinZIP should probably have died in the 90s.

CamperBob2 3y ago

Because some people, for reasons known only to themselves, still insist on using .tar files in 2023.

xxs 3y ago

>Zip is built into literally everything. Deflate is a 16bit algorithm from '91. Which is slow and the density is low.

cynicalsecurity 3y ago

Have you ever tried unpacking files with special characters from zip? Like umlauts, etc? Especially between different machines. It produces broken file names. Zip doesn't store access rights, unlike tar. That's why tar gzip is so popular on Linux.

WeylandYutani 3y ago

I'm an old school pirate and have a cracked winrar 6.1 on my PC. It just works. Old habits and all that.

katbyte 3y ago

both provide much better compression then zip, and when you are compressing large amounts of compressible data that is important. i personally use rar (not winrar because i am not on windows) because it also: locks created archive, tests it, and adds a recovery record so if a few bits or even bytes flip it can be recovered. rar also has a ton of options to customize compression like splitting into multiple files (i think 7z does this too as well)

ElectricalUnion 3y ago

> Zip is built into literally everything. I don't really want to have to download another application to unpack something I get. There's a more interesting question lying in there: "Zip is built into literally everything." From my anecdotal evidence with random Windows software, for said support, developers probably bundled 7zip in order to support compressed file formats. Granted, in the end the fact that 7zip is bundled, or if 7zip and it's several features are exposed to you as a end-user is another story.

jccalhoun 3y ago

I use Nanazip which is a version of 7zip with modernization (although its development seems to have slowed considerably so I may switch back to regular 7zip) because I do run into compressed file other than zips. When windows 11 support for rar and 7z comes out I may stop using it.

oefrha 3y ago

You mean the zip feature built into Windows that will refuse to compress if there’s any file with non-Latin1 character in its name, and will garble Unicode filenames compressed on other platforms? No I’m not talking about Windows 2000, it’s the same in Windows 11. For ~half of the world’s population it’s literally useless.

Yournothed 3y ago

RAR is the standard way to distribute warez scene releases. If you're getting your releases from a topsite or other high quality sources, everything will be in RARs. Installing WinRAR is the first thing you do when scening. It's like when you install Windows and install Firefox before doing anything.

senectus1 3y ago

windows built in zip cant handle long paths, or special characters. 7zip is a much more powerful tool

soared 3y ago

Default unzipping in windows requires admin privileges for some reason on my work laptop, so I had IT install winrar so I could unzip without admin access.

jandrese 3y ago
Your admins have locked down the temporary directory that the zip routine uses to store extracted files before copying them into the final location. That's the sort of paranoia that breaks a lot of applications in hard to diagnose ways.

gruez 3y ago

You don't occasionally need to open .7z or .tar.gz files?

ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
> You don't occasionally need to open .7z I do an I absolutely loathe when something is compressed as 7z.
chankstein38 3y ago
I do but I wouldn't if other people didn't put them in that format instead of zip. That said, I know tar.gz is native to linux so that one I understand more than 7z but this thread is showing there are definitely legit uses!

MikusR 3y ago

Recovery records.

jcpham2 3y ago

As a sysadmin, I frequently deploy 7zip via .msi to all machines that I think might even have the slightest use to open archive files. It's not that the OS doesn't support .zip it's that the OS ONLY support .zip out of the box and the OS .zip file manager is inadequate in many troubleshooting scenarios. Sometimes you need to split archives Sometimes you want to open a non-standard file type with something to unpack it (.xlsx/self extracting .exe) Sometimes you've got Software Restriction Policies that prevent standard %temp% extraction installers from running and need to manually extract a package. This is the short list

kwanbix 3y ago

I upvoted you, as people are so intolerant today that downvote anything they don't like, like spoiled kids. It is crazy. That said, RAR and 7zip compress much, much better than ZIP (faster or more).

chankstein38 3y ago
Thank you, I was worried about that. I wonder about this a lot and HN always thought like the right place to ask!

rjsw 3y ago

I have been told that 7zip handles long pathnames better than the zip functionality built in to Windows.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

.7z gets way better compression than .zip, in my experience. Plus, 7-zip can handle the odd archive here and there that I'm forced to download on my corporate PC that Windows cannot. Like a tarball. Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful. So to answer your question: there are plenty of legitimate reasons to still use 7zip. I can't think of any legitimate reasons to still use WinRAR, though...

housemusicfan 3y ago
> Finally, the built-in integrity hashing that 7-zip adds to the right-click context menu in Windows is crazy useful. Ironic, isn't 7-Zip the program where the developer has famously refused to provide download hashes or digital signatures of the release binaries?
rowbin 3y ago
Interesting, never heard tarballs being classified as odd before. They are still widely used.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  If it's something you intend to package to a non-Windows user then sure it's not odd. I send file archives to non-tech users all the time internally. I absolutely do not tarball them, I zip them. When it comes to less tech savvy users, a tarball is definitely an odd format to deal with.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  If you're a non-developer Windows user, you won't encounter a tarball in the wild very often. I think I first ran into one when I wanted an emulator in the early aughts (as a teenager) and found it on Sourceforge. My immediate thoughts were, "What the hell is this?" and "Why didn't they just give me an EXE?"
LinuxBender 3y ago
One advantage of WinRAR over 7-Zip is the option to add recovery data and data parity recovery files. This can of course be accomplished on any file using PAR2 but it saved a step which some people liked. Not everyone needs this option. I create PAR files when I back up important archives to multiple external drives. par2cmdline [1] is in some Linux repositories. [1] - https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline [In need of a new maintainer]

jsheard 3y ago

Microsoft is (finally) adding native support for tar/gz/bz2/rar/7z (edit: and xz/zstd) to Windows, so third party apps shouldn't be required for much longer. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/08/18/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-22621-2199-and-22631-2199-beta-channel/ https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/08/18/announc... It's only available on the preview channel for now but it's coming.

tssva 3y ago
Command line support for these formats has existed in Windows for multiple years via bsdtar which has shipped with Windows for quite a while now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hulitu 3y ago
  Huh ? Parent was talking about bz2, xz.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tssva 3y ago
    The comment originally mentioned tar/gz/bz2/rar/7z support being added to Windows. bsdtar supports all of these.
    - andrewf 3y ago
      bsdtar is backed by libarchive, which supports all the formats listed at https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveFormats https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...
xxpor 3y ago
Have they added lz4 and xz as well?

jabroni_salad 3y ago

winrar is really good if you wish to split a big file into smaller chunks, since it has parity features.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

specproc 3y ago

IIRC there was some issue with non-Latin characters in filenames in zips on older Windows. The details escape me, but I live somewhere with a non-Latin script and it rars were very popular here ten-fifteen years ago for this reason.

Nyan 3y ago
Many older formats, ZIP included, didn't standardise on an encoding, so they just use whatever the local 8-bit encoding happens to be. And if your system charset is different from the ZIP creator's, you could get messed up filenames. This is just another cost of sticking to legacy formats.
chankstein38 3y ago
That's interesting! I feel like I've run into that as well pulling down a repo or something at some point!

CJefferson 3y ago

Rar seems to handle Chinese filenames much better than zip.

coolfission 3y ago

Probably because all those youtubers say to download WinRAR to extract files so people don't know that there's better alternatives. I also recommend NanaZip (a fork of 7zip) instead of 7zip since it integrates better with Windows 11 context menu.

nonethewiser 3y ago

It's been a few years since I daily-drove windows but I remember that I used 7zip sometimes because the native zip didn't work at times. As I recall I ran into issues with it failing on deeply nested files.

dataflow 3y ago

WinRAR has way more useful options available than 7-zip. Like adding a recovery record, storing certain file extensions without compression, etc.

msla 3y ago

I wonder how much of Windows' profusion of archive formats is a hangover from the MS-DOS archiver wars.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

7zip is great if you are zipping up your own data. RAR is used on the internet because large files get broken up into smaller parts to get transferred and you can use RAR to determine whether your compressed fileset is legitimate or if it needs repair. That's where recovery volumes come in. If it won't unrar, then you can just add enough recovery files until it does.

antihero 3y ago

Any reason that LZMA support isn't build into Windows? I think there's maybe some licensing issues with RAR perhaps.

HPsquared 3y ago

I find 7-zip is a lot faster than the Windows Explorer Zip handler.

ok123456 3y ago
That's because it supports multicore by default.

izackp 3y ago

7zip supports aes-256 encryption on zip files. Windows does not.

tredre3 3y ago

I use WinRAR because 7zip's handling of tar.gz/bz is abysmal. It first opens the .gz so you have a list containing the tar. Then you can double click the tar to browse it, but it will need to extract it fully to the temp folder first. WinRAR opens a .tar.gz like any other single-format archive (zip, rar, 7z) so it's much much faster, but also more intuitive. Even though I use WinRAR, I only create ZIPs for compatibility with others. I would also stick to ZIPs if I were to use 7zip.

dogleash 3y ago

7Zip - the tool not the format - is about as unobtrusive to use as it gets, supports every archive format we deal with on a regular basis, has a very tolerable license and provides better feedback than explorer's zip. It also handles our zip files that explorer is known to choke on. And because we can assume everyone in the office has 7zip, we don't have to create zips for things that go between windows and linux systems.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>unobtrusive We are talking about the program that adds like four options to the right click menu throughout your entire system right?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Arguably very useful options. For instance, try using 7zip to extract an .exe installer sometime -- right click on it and extract it into its own dir and see what is in it.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  In the submenu. And it's useful not to wrestle with the unregistered filetypes or just RMB on some .exe to be able to unpack it.
- ls612 3y ago
  I've used 7zip for a decade and just a couple months ago I discovered in addition to everything I knew about already it also offers it also has a SHA-256 checksum tool in it's context menu! It is legitimately one of the most useful utilities on my system.
- OGWhales 3y ago
  You can choose what shows up in that context menu or choose to show nothing at all, you can also choose to have it cascade (which I believe is the default).

josefresco 3y ago

.RAR file support The Windows zip tool failed just yesterday because some of my file names had illegal characters yet 7zip/winrar handled it no problem. Better compression / more options Beyond that, there's not much I need it for but every time I remove it ... I end up needed it shortly!