The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of

file archiver A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage. File archivers may employ lossless data compression in their archive formats ...

s. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. They are neither all-inclusive nor are some entries necessarily up to date. Unless otherwise specified in the footnotes section, comparisons are based on the stable versions—''without'' add-ons, extensions or external programs.

Archivers

''Note: Archivers with names cell background highlighted in purple are no longer in development.''

General information

Basic general information about the archivers. Notes:

Operating system support

The

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s the archivers can run on without emulation or compatibility layer. Ubuntu's own GUI ''Archive manager,'' for example, can open and create many archive formats (including Rar archives) even to the extent of splitting into parts and encryption and ability to be read by the ''native program''. This is presumably a "compatibility layer." Notes: # A separate 64-bit Windows x64 Edition version is also available. # The

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

system port is known as p7zip. p7zip also is provided by FreeDOS. # A

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

release (version 9.05-alpha onward) is available. # The programs for other platforms are called Unace, do not have the same

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, and can only perform decompression. # WinRAR is for Windows, RAR for other platforms. # This program also has a

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

version available. # General

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...

version. # Also Acorn RISC OS, Atari, MVS, OS/2, VM/CMS, VMS and others. # Bundled with Windows 10 since insider build 17063

Archiver features

Information about what common archiver features are implemented natively (without third-party add-ons). Notes: # Application is only for decompression. # Traditionally, tar, cpio, or pax calls the external programs gzip and bzip2 to perform compression; these external programs usually come with systems that contain the archiver. This is the case for

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

tar. BSD tar uses its own implementation, since it also has to deal with archive formats that do their own compression. # Allows for a variable amount of

error correction In information theory and coding theory with applications in computer science and telecommunication, error detection and correction (EDAC) or error control are techniques that enable reliable delivery of digital data over unreliable communica ...

. See also

RAR (file format) RAR is a proprietary format, proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by ''win.rar GmbH'' ...

. # Extracting/adding file and/or directory names into archive in either

UTF-7 UTF-7 (7-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is an obsolete variable-length character encoding for representing Unicode text using a stream of ASCII characters. It was originally intended to provide a means of encoding Unicode text for use in Inte ...

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

UTF-16/UCS-2 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as cod ...

encoding to support single file/directory name which contains characters from different languages. More recent versions of the zip file format have support for Unicode filenames. # In WinRAR 3.60, when opening 7-Zip archives which contains Unicode file/directory names, they will not be displayed correctly. There will be no problem extracting them, however. # Does support Unicode names, but not under the default (initial) option settings: the user must tick "Use OEM conversion for filenames" under "General" on the "Miscellaneous" tab in the Configuration dialog to enable Unicode name support. Full support for Unicode files names by default is supported only for 7-Zip and RAR archive formats. # Commandline batch compression is available only for ZIP and ALZ formats. # UTF-8 file/path-names support was completed in release 3.0.1 on Unix systems, and in release 5.8.0 on Windows systems. GUI UTF-8 support for full internationalization of the application was completed in release 2.2.0. Optionally, extended characters can be set to be replaced by jolly "?" character for exporting scripts to legacy systems; scripts creation screen informs if commands are ANSI-safe, OEM-codepage-safe (on Windows), or requires UTF-8 compliant environment to run (system, command interpreter, etc). # Commandline batch compression and expansion requires free add-on software downloaded from the WinZip website. # Peazip supports file encryption and file name encryption, although only in certain types of archives, including its own Pea format, 7-zip, zip and Arc. # Many shells have built-in zip file support.

Windows Explorer File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file ...

has "Send To"->"ZIP-compressed folder". # Unicode and volumes since version 3.0 (2008). AES since 3.1 (in beta).

Archive format support

Reading

Information about what

archive formats In computing, an archive file is a computer file that is composed of one or more files along with metadata. Archive files are used to collect multiple data files together into a single file for easier portability and storage, or simply to compress ...

the archivers can read. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the archiver or extensions that provide such functionality. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are compression formats rather than archive formats. Notes: # Used to, but no longer does, due to technical and legal issues. # Tar implementations call external programs (like

compress compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to more modern compression utilities such as gzip and bzip2, compress performs faster and with less memory usage, at the cost of a significantly l ...

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 in ...

or bzip2 or any other programs working with abstract streams and supporting the "-d" option) to perform (de)compression, and allowing you to implement your own filters. These external programs may be shipped with your Operating System. # GNU tar lets you implement your own filter

allowing you to use other compression programs (p7zip, ...) and filters (GPG, ...). # Starting from version 11. # Requires external program
More info
# Archive Utility itself is unable to open ISO files, but

Disk Utility A disk utility is a utility program that allows a user to perform various functions on a computer disk, such as disk partitioning and logical volume management, as well as multiple smaller tasks such as changing drive letters and other mount poi ...

, which also comes with Mac OS X, is able to mount them as virtual disks. # Requires external progra

# Only partial support for reading proprietary SITX format

# FreeARC uses .arc as its filename extension, but this format is not the same as the ARC (file format), traditional ARC file. # Supports these formats as compression stream of other archive formats like tar.bz2 or iso.xz but does not support the format as an archive itself, as they are not archive formats. See the above explanation for tar. # B1 Free Archiver for Android and B1 Online Archiver support ARJ format. # libarchive has issues reading RAR formats, some partial reads are unsupported hence broken for generic usage

Writing

Information about what

the archivers can write and create. External links lead to information about support in future versions of the archiver or extensions that provide such functionality. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are compression formats rather than archive formats. Notes: # Tar implementations call the external programs gzip and bzip2, 7z, xz, ... to perform compression; these external programs usually come with systems that contain tar. # Requires rar.exe from WinRAR. # Requires external program(if you are using WinZip 11.1 or earlier)
More info
# Requires Ace32.exe from WinAce. # The Extractor and XAD are not included in this list because they only expand archives. # ALZip can also write to the following formats: BH, JAR, and LZH # Updating archives is not supporte

# Requires external progra

# Stuffit supported file format

# Ark is a front end processor (program), front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Ark; writing in

.rar RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by ''win.rar GmbH''. The name ''RA ...

format requires a

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

program

# Xarchiver is a front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Xarchiver; writing in .rar format requires a commercial program

https://web.archive.org/web/20090629195522/http://xarchiver.xfce.org/doc/ch03s03.html] # Archive Manager (previously known as "File Roller") is a front-end only and requires appropriate command-line programs be installed. Programs like bzip2, gzip, tar, zip usually come with systems that contain Archive Manager. writing in .rar format requires a commercial progra

# If there are more than one, files must be grouped in a .tar before being compressed. # supports the formats as stream compression of other archive format and can create compressed format like tar.bz2 or iso.xz but cannot create an archive in these formats # it is possible to open war and jar files to extract e add/replace file; files war and jar are still valid after that # it require console rar.exe, and the path to it -- specified in Options . it can be taken from WinRAR software . PowerArchiever also doesn't support separate definition of the Dictionary Size and Compression Method .

Uncommon archive format support

PeaZip has full support for Brotli, Zstandard, various LPAQ and

PAQ PAQ is a series of lossless data compression archivers that have gone through collaborative development to top rankings on several benchmarks measuring compression ratio (although at the expense of speed and memory usage). Specialized versions ...

formats, QUAD / BALZ / BCM (highly efficient ROLZ based compressors),

FreeArc FreeArc is a free and open-source high-performance file archiver developed by Bulat Ziganshin. The project is considered abandonware as no information has been released by developers since 2016 and the official website is down. A "FreeArc Next" ...

format, and for its native

PEA The pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the flowering plant species ''Pisum sativum''. Each pod contains several peas, which can be green or yellow. Botanically, pea pods are fruit, since they contain seeds and d ...

format. 7-Zip includes read support for

.msi Windows Installer (msiexec.exe, previously known as Microsoft Installer, codename Darwin) is a software component and application programming interface (API) of Microsoft Windows used for the installation, maintenance, and removal of software. ...

cpio cpio is a general file archiver utility and its associated file format. It is primarily installed on Unix-like computer operating systems. The software utility was originally intended as a tape archiving program as part of the Programmer's Workb ...

and xar, plus Apple's

dmg DMG may refer to: Organizations Entertainment * Dames Making Games, a Canadian non-profit organization that encourages the participation of women, non-binary, femme and queer people in the creation of video games * Davidson Media Group, an American ...

HFS HFS may refer to: Computing * Hardware functionality scan, a security mechanism used in Microsoft Windows operating systems * Hierarchical File System, a file system used by Apple Macintosh computers * Hierarchical File System (IBM MVS), used MV ...

disk images and the deb/

.rpm RPM Package Manager (RPM) (originally Red Hat Package Manager, now a recursive acronym) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primaril ...

package distribution formats; beta versions (9.07 onwards) have full support for the LZMA2-compressed . xz format.