StuffIt Expander is a proprietary,

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

closed source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

, decompression software utility developed by Allume Systems (a subsidiary of Smith Micro Software formerly known as Aladdin Systems). It runs on the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. Prior to 2011, a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

version had also been available for download. The latest version for each Mac platform is as follows: * 16.2 for

OS X 10.11 OS X El Capitan ( ) () is the twelfth major release of macOS (named OS X at the time of El Capitan's release), Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh. It focuses mainly on performance, stability, and security. Followin ...

+ (as of December 2020); * 16.0.5 for Mac OS X 10.8+; * 15.0.7 (2011) for Mac OS X 10.6.8+; * 15.0.4 (2011) for Mac OS X 10.5+; * 14.0.1 (2010) for

Mac OS X 10.4 Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005, for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Incl ...

+; * 10.0.2 for Mac OS X 10.3+; * 8.0.2 for

Mac OS X 10.0 Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001, for a price of $129 after a public beta. Mac OS X was Apple's successor to the classic Ma ...

+; * 7.0.3 for Mac OS 8.6+; * 6.0.1 for Mac OS 8.1+ (PowerPC only); * 5.5.1 for System 7.1+ (68020 and up, PowerPC); * 4.5 for

System 6 System 6 (or System Software 6) is the sixth major release of the classic Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer. It was released in 1988. It is a monolithic operating system, with cooperative multitasking bas ...

+ (compatible with all 68k processors). StuffIt has been a target of criticism and dissatisfaction from Mac users in the past as the file format changes frequently, notably during the introduction of StuffIt version 5.0. Expander 5.0 contained many bugs, and its file format was not readable by the earlier version 4.5, leaving Mac users of the time without a viable compression utility. The latest stand-alone version for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

is 2011 (15.0). Unlike the version before it (12.0), which was only able to decompress the newer (and ZIP) archives, version 2009 claims to be able to decompress over 30 formats, some listed below. The executables require both, the .NET v2.0 framework and MSVC 2008 (9.0) runtimes. The previous stand-alone version able to decompress and other

-specific archives was 7.02, distributed with

StuffIt StuffIt is a discontinued family of computer software utilities for archiving and compressing files. Originally produced for Macintosh, versions for Microsoft Windows, Linux (x86), and Sun Solaris were later created. The proprietary compression ...

v7.0.x for

. From versions 7.5.x to 11 the Expander capabilities were actually performed by the StuffIt Standard Edition, that allowed decompression even after the end of the trial period. To start

in Expander mode the following command line switches were used: . Note that the registration reminder dialogue box is not shown in this case. With older versions of StuffIt Expander on the classic Mac OS platform, such as StuffIt Expander 3.5, it was possible to enhance the capabilities of StuffIt Expander and to add support for decompressing additional archive formats by means of the shareware DropStuff with Expander Enhancer software from Aladdin Systems. There is also a

command line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

application called UNSTUFF v1.1 that allows decompression of files. StuffIt Expander 2009 decompresses files in the following formats: *

7-Zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own Archive file, archive forma ...

(, ) * AppleSingle () * Arc () * ARJ () *

BinHex BinHex, originally short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system which was used on the classic Mac OS for sending binary files over email. BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but avoid data corruption ...

(), all versions *

BTOA Ascii85, also called Base85, is a form of binary-to-text encoding developed by Paul E. Rutter for the btoa utility. By using five ASCII characters to represent four bytes of binary data (making the encoded size larger than the original, assuming ...

(, ) *

bzip2 bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities such as tar for tasks such as handli ...

(, , , , , , , ) * CAB () *

Compact Pro Compact Pro is a software data compression utility for archiving and compressing files on the Apple Macintosh platform. It was a major competitor to StuffIt in the early 1990s, producing smaller archives in less time, able to create self-extrac ...

() *

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and ...

(, ) * LHA (, ) * LZMA (, , ) *

MacBinary MacBinary is a file format that combines the data fork and the resource fork of a classic Mac OS file into a single file, along with Hierarchical File System (Apple), HFS's extended metadata. The resulting file is suitable for transmission over Fil ...

(, ), all versions * MIME/Base 64 () * Private File (), Aladdin's

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

file format * RAR (, , , ), including segmented * SpaceSaver StuffIt compression format used in versions prior 5.x *

(, , , , , ) v1.5.1 to 8.0.x, including encrypted, segmented and

self-extracting archive A self-extracting archive (SFX or SEA) is a computer executable program which combines compressed data in an archive file with machine-executable code to extract the information. Running on a compatible operating system, it does not need a ...

(Classic Mac OS file type code 'SIT!') *

tar Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black b ...

(, , , , ) * Unix

Compress compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to gzip's fastest setting, compress is slightly slower at compression, slightly faster at decompression, and has a significantly lower compression ...

(, , ) * UU (, , ), PC/Unix 8 bit to 7 bit encoding similar to BinHex () *

yEnc yEnc is a binary-to-text encoding scheme for transferring binary files in messages on Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead over previous US-ASCII-based encoding methods by using an 8-bit encoding method. yEnc's overhead is often (if ea ...

ode (, ) * ZIP (, , , ), including encrypted, Zip64, segmented and

References

External links

Current Stuffit homepage, with links to download Mac and Windows versions
{{Compression Software Implementations Classic Mac OS software MacOS archivers and compression-related utilities Data compression software Freeware