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7-Zip 25.00
- doctorpangloss 1y agoWhy doesn't Windows ship with an unarchiving utility?
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIt does ship with one, right click on zip file -> extract all. Why are you posting incorrect information that would have been clarified to you by a 3 second google search beforehand? It didn't ship in the distant past due to anti-competitive reasons but it is there now.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoIt ships with a very terrible wizard. Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck?
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>It ships with a very terrible wizard. Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions. > Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck? And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different meaning than what you say you meant.
- Dylan16807 1y agoWhen it has bad support for just zip I think phrasing it as windows lacking an unarchiving utility is reasonable enough, and certainly not bad enough to get flagged like the comment currently is. It's not bad faith, jeez. I'm going to go vouch for the comment and hope it survives. And it's only because of that comment that I learned windows 11 finally improves things.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoWho's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> Who's the judge of zip support being 'bad'? > HN users are different breed of sticklers that aren't representative of the norm. It acts kind of like a folder but tons of things don't work when you navigate into it. And it hasn't been improved in 20 years. It's bad. It's significantly worse for a random person because stuff breaks and they don't know why. At least if you try to run an exe it asks about extracting the whole thing so that one case is less likely to blow up. > There's a grand canyon gap between something not existing and you not liking it how it works because your personal tastes, hence why the comment is flagged, because it's in bad faith and disingenuous. Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format is enough to make the original comment merely sloppy wording. It's not bad faith or disingenuous. Don't be so judgemental.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>Just the fact that it doesn't work for any other archive format Humor me, how popular or other non-zip formats for average Joe's uses? I'm a paper user and can't remember the last time I encountered a non zip format.
- Dylan16807 1y agoI'm not sure but I've sure seen a lot of winrar memes.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI guess that settles it.
- kotaKat 1y agoThe Extraction Wizard is a bit clunky opening a dialog box asking where you want to extract things... ...then a brief flash as the decompress happens because it's no longer 1998 and we're not extracting 2 MB of ZIP files on a Pentium 166, ... then you get a silly "complete!" screen with a pre-filled checkbox that spawns another Windows Explorer window by default. Eh, three clunky "wizard" screens is a bit much for a "extract here..." command.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoThat never bothered me. That's a non issues for normal people.
- jchw 1y agoI think you're talking about the extraction feature that came with ZIP folders. Aside from being clunky it's also rather inefficient and slow, it doesn't have any provisions for handling issues like mojibake, and is generally just not very robust. So why? AFAIK it's because the ZIP Folders/Visual ZIP code was basically integrated with Windows and then never updated. When it shipped in Windows XP (and possibly earlier, but I don't remember for sure) I think it was perfectly serviceable... it just didn't improve much over time. I can't really stomach Windows 11 so I don't personally use it but my understanding is that the latest version of Windows 11 has finally integrated a better solution, implementing archive extraction based on libarchive.
- rjsw 1y agoIt doesn't ship with a working unarchive utility, the one that is included will discard anything that goes over the maximum pathname length.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoWeird, I never ran into that issue. Am I holding it wrong?
- monster_truck 1y agoIt also tends to kill explorer any time you try to decompress anything you'd actually compress in the first place (ie 100gb of json or a db dump)
- jore 1y agoI think that at least since win10 there is zip embedded in windows, it’s just not 7z
- gertop 1y agoZip support has been in Windows since XP. In 11 (and maybe later 10 updates) they added 7z and rar support.
- OptionOfT 1y agoExcept weirdly enough, when you open a .zip there is an "Extract All" button. When you open a .tar.gz or a .rar that button is gone. For those you need to do right mouse on the .tar.gz or .rar and click "Extract All...". I miss the days when Windows' UI was consistent.
- extraduder_ire 1y agoI don't think windows UI has ever been consistent after the second release. It's just more noticeable on 11/10 because the last four releases each have a very distinct visual style.
- lousken 1y agoit goes much further back than that, think it was xp the issue is that it sucks, it's at least 10x slower than 7 zip, maybe more, showing lots of files/folders freezes the explorer gui on w10 and it only supports .zip (which could've been changed on w11, never used, never tried)
- jchw 1y agoWindows has shipped with "ZIP folders" and the ability to create and extract ZIP files since the late 90s/early 2000s I believe (not sure exactly what version.) As of the latest versions of Windows 11, Windows ships with libarchive-based archive extraction, which should let you extract many archives natively (including 7-zip and RAR) via the UI as well as the CLI (via BSD TAR, which also ships with Windows these days.)
- genocidicbunny 1y agoI think those first appeared in some form in XP. I don't recall 2000 having support for it integrated into explorer.
- Dwedit 1y agoThey were introduced in the Microsoft Plus package for Windows 98, then finally integrated into Windows ME. Windows ME was released after Windows 2000, so the feature didn't appear there. But it did appear in XP. You could actually install the Windows ME version of the shell extension on 2000.
- genocidicbunny 1y agoAh, well that might explain my thinking it came around in the XP days - by then I had discovered the WinRAR indefinite trial, so I didn't really need an alternative.
- Dwedit 1y agoZIP Folders was developed by Dave Plummer from Microsoft (who runs the Dave's Garage YouTube channel). It was made in his spare time, then was licensed to Microsoft afterwards.
- Suppafly 1y ago>ZIP Folders was developed by Dave Plummer from Microsoft I'm not sure I'd tell people I did that if it were me.
- jccalhoun 1y agoIn October of 2023 Windows 11 was updated to use libarchive https://www.techspot.com/news/100663-windows-11-extends-support-archive-formats-thanks-open.html https://www.techspot.com/news/100663-windows-11-extends-supp...
- Suppafly 1y agoIt does, but it's annoying because it treats things as folders, which I suppose is nice if you just want to look inside the zip, but a pain if you just want to extract something in a normal way like you'd do with any other unzipping utility.
- SomeHacker44 1y agoI wish there were an easy way to get Explorer not to show Zip files as a "folder." Such a huge anti feature for me.
- gertop 1y agoI wish 7-zip would support .tar.gz the way WinRAR does. WinRAR allows you to browse a .tar.gz without extracting it, 7-zip extracts the .tar to a temp file. It makes working with large .tar.gz files impossible. (Yes I know that because of how .tar works WinRAR must decompresses it to build the files list. But it beats having to write a 1TB .tar to disk just to see the file listing.
- blibble 1y agohow is that possible? tar.gz files don't have a central directory (like zip), and they are compressed as one stream (almost always non-seekable)
- wslh 1y agoI am guessing the gzip is retrieved as a stream and then reading the tar from that stream in memory?
- nine_k 1y agoDecompress, scan as you go, discard. Having to read a few hundred GB and scan a terabyte is a nuisance. Not having to write a terabyte is priceless.
- mikepurvis 1y agoCould also maintain an in-memory index so that you can go back after the fact and extract individual files.
- duskwuff 1y agoThat's less helpful than you might imagine - gzip isn't seekable by default; if all you know is the seek point, you still have to decompress everything up to that point to start decompressing from there. And if you have to do that, reading the tar headers as you go isn't a serious burden. What might help is saving the state of the decompressor periodically, rather than just the index in the file. But that's getting pretty far into the weeds for an optimization to an infrequently used feature.
- Dwedit 1y ago7-Zip 15.05 is still useful today, because it was the last version to include built-in support for decompiling NSIS installer scripts. The feature was removed due to security concerns.
- parlortricks 1y agoWhy is decompiling NSIS a security concern?
- Dwedit 1y agoIn case of bugs in the decompiler. Extracting the files is still possible in newer versions, just not decompiling the installer scripts.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agowhat is NSIS?
- orbital-decay 1y agoNullsoft Scriptable Install System, a byproduct of Winamp that is ubiquitous in lightweight software installers for Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/
- mmebane 1y agoI've not personally used it, but there's a fork that adds NSIS decompilation back in: https://github.com/myfreeer/7z-build-nsis https://github.com/myfreeer/7z-build-nsis
- pregnenolone 1y agoI wish either RAR or 7-Zip would finally implement a memory-hard KDF for encrypted archives.
- ofek 1y agoFor those who are unaware, there is another project [1] that tracks upstream which adds support for various codecs like Zstandard. Many folks (such as myself) opt to install their releases instead. [1]: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd
- doubled112 1y agoPerhaps a tangent, but until now, I've only seen or used "codec" in the audio/video sense. While somehow awkward, it seems this would also be correct, since it also compresses and decompresses. Video codec but archive format. Sometimes you see a word used a new way and wonder if you've just been wrong all these years.
- heavyset_go 1y agoThe defining factor isn't compression/decompression, it's just encoding. You'll see codec used in things like text encoding.
- deaddodo 1y agoWhile technically true, the term has been largely co-opted by the A/V realm. It’s pretty rare to hear outside of the context.
- diroussel 1y agoRare for people who don't deal with encoding and decoding maybe. To be clear the codec implements the compression (or other encoding) algorithm. So when talking about codec's we mean the implementation. But when talking about the algorithm, we are talking about the standard of encoding the encoder or decoder implements.
- deaddodo 1y ago> Rare for people who don't deal with encoding and decoding maybe. No, rare in general. It's a layman's co-opting, and laymen outnumber specialists in every field.
- shmerl 1y agoLately I use zstd + tar for making archives that preserve file metadata.
- jainilprajapati 1y agoI don’t know why we need this now because Microsoft had in build zip so
- atmanactive 1y agoBecause that one is rubbish, and this is gold.
- gaws 1y agoIs there an alternative version for Linux?