[HN Gopher] 7-Zip for Linux
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       7-Zip for Linux
        
       Author : conductor
       Score  : 97 points
       Date   : 2021-03-11 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sourceforge.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sourceforge.net)
        
       | tus89 wrote:
       | Here I am thinking I have been using 7zip on Linux for years. So
       | p7zip is a third-party port?
        
         | chungy wrote:
         | It is, yes.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | augusto-moura wrote:
       | We always had official posix 7zip (aka p7zip)[1] support for
       | linux, is this a different version or a new release?
       | 
       | Edit: read the description, so it is a different port, any any
       | apparent enhancements though?
       | 
       | [1]: https://www.7-zip.org/download.html
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | it's by a different author.
         | 
         | In the site that you linked:
         | 
         | >p7zip is the command line version of 7-Zip for Linux / Unix,
         | made by an independent developer.
         | 
         | In the link for this post:
         | 
         | >It's first version of my port of 7-Zip to Linux.
         | 
         | >That port of 7-Zip is similar to p7zip, but it's not identical
         | to p7zip.
        
           | augusto-moura wrote:
           | Yeah, commented before fully reading the description
        
         | AdmiralAsshat wrote:
         | > And developer of p7zip port didn't show any activity last 4-5
         | years.
         | 
         | I guess that would be why. I, too, assumed we had an actively
         | maintained Linux port, but if the maintainer isn't doing much
         | these days, a version closer to upstream would be great.
         | 
         | The 7zip author by his own admission does not use Linux,
         | though, so I'd be curious if p7zip might actually be more
         | performant on Linux.
        
           | wnoise wrote:
           | > the maintainer isn't doing much these days,
           | 
           | Is there much to do?
        
         | kumarsw wrote:
         | Does this fix the issue of 7zip not supporting unix file
         | permissions? I recall that was the main issue everyone hated
         | the 7zip linux port.
        
           | LinuxBender wrote:
           | I don't know the answer to your question, just adding that
           | you can work around that by using tar to preserve ownership,
           | permissions, extended attributes, selinux contexts, then use
           | 7zip on that tar file. This can all be done in pipes in one
           | command line.
        
             | chungy wrote:
             | At that point, you might as well just use xz and skip 7z
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | Even considering that this is for linux, I still get pretty sad
       | whenever I see windows users running winrar. 7-zip is simpler to
       | use, (mostly) as fast and as compressed as rar. I really see no
       | reason windows users still use winrar.
        
         | franga2000 wrote:
         | WinRAR is much easier to use than 7-zip in my experience.
         | PeaZIP is easier than both, but WinRAR still wins on the "you
         | don't actually need to know what a zip file is" point. It's
         | both a blessing and a curse though - I've had a couple of
         | situations where people were running portable programs from zip
         | files and promptly losing their work once they closed WinRAR.
        
           | pitaj wrote:
           | > WinRAR is much easier to use than 7-zip in my experience.
           | 
           | In what way?
        
             | franga2000 wrote:
             | The big icons make way more sense and more things have
             | icons, the ".." line is more natural than the dedicated
             | "dir up" button, the "create archive" dialog is more
             | organized and its options more discoverable...
             | 
             | And when you run an executable from it, it (I think) unzips
             | the whole archive, not just the file, so DLLs etc. can be
             | loaded properly. Just saves some effort and thinking when
             | you need it and doesn't make a difference when you don't
        
             | auganov wrote:
             | Never compared archivers at length, cannot speak as to the
             | actual features. But 7z has this distinct unfinished open-
             | source GUI tool look. That's all I remember about it. It
             | may or may not be true that it has poor UX. But the
             | aesthetics certainly do signal this. Personally, on Windows
             | I used 360Ya Suo  which seems to be a better looking winrar
             | clone without nag screens. On Linux it's "atool -x" for
             | extracting (there's no decent Linux file explorer, so the
             | main selling point of archiver guis is moot too).
        
               | moistbar wrote:
               | > there's no decent Linux file explorer
               | 
               | Dolphin, PCManFM, and MC would all like a word with you.
               | 
               | Also, 7Zip is no harder to use than the built-in Windows
               | zip extractor if you use the context menu.
        
         | devwastaken wrote:
         | 7zip does not properly handle japanese character sets on
         | Windows. Winrar does, though you have to specify the language.
        
           | pitaj wrote:
           | In the UI? In file names? In the file contents?
        
             | fredoralive wrote:
             | I have vague memories that things like Shift JIS file names
             | get scrambled? IIRC it was a case of it using the users
             | default non-Unicode / "ANSI" codepage instead of offering a
             | selection like Winzip apparently does.
        
         | hansel_der wrote:
         | maybe they want to unpack rar-archives?
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | AFAIK there're opensource decompressors for rar files. Except
           | for RAR6 which are definitely not very common.
        
           | pitaj wrote:
           | You can do that with 7zip IIRC
        
         | LinuxBender wrote:
         | The only thing that comes to mind is the lack of par files or
         | some equivalent construct.
        
         | MikusR wrote:
         | Recovery records.
        
         | diarrhea wrote:
         | Perhaps they paid for it and it's a sunken cost fallacy.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | Most people I see using winrar have not paid for it. And they
           | have to deal with the snag screen every time. I think it has
           | to do with inertia.
        
             | tener wrote:
             | Companies tend to use it and buy new licenses due to the
             | same inertia you mentioned. Although the more cost
             | conscious will at some point switch to the free
             | alternatives.
        
             | scaladev wrote:
             | Educate them if you can. Whenever I see someone using
             | crapware like bandicam I give them a link to OBS Studio and
             | briefly describe its advantages. Same for winrar and 7zip.
             | They usually don't know any better and were using whatever
             | everyone else was using.
        
         | smnrchrds wrote:
         | Back in the day, one of the selling points of the RAR format
         | was that it could partition large files into multiple archives,
         | so you could upload it in chunks, or copy it to multiple flash
         | drives or CDs. Have other archive formats caught up with this
         | feature?
        
           | tener wrote:
           | 7zip for sure has. It actually supports it for more than just
           | 7z format.
        
           | agurk wrote:
           | I was about to reply a little snarkily that I was doing this
           | with zip archives on floppy disks back in the 90s. I thought
           | I might as well check my facts before posting, and it looks
           | like that was a part of WinZip that was not part of the
           | standard.
           | 
           | In 2015 ISO published a standard pertaining to zip archives,
           | and one of the specifications was (from Wikipedia):
           | Archives may not span multiple volumes or be segmented.
           | 
           | There are also multiple forum posts when you search for
           | multipart zip archives of Linux users asking how to
           | decompress them, suggesting that this is only WinZip
           | behaviour and not common to the zip standard.
        
             | marcodiego wrote:
             | I remember people using arj exactly because of that
             | feature. Compression with arj was worse than zip but people
             | used it because you could divide an arj archive in
             | floppies. At the time, rar could do it too, but it only got
             | popular later.
        
             | diggernet wrote:
             | I had the same reaction, but checked a different set of
             | facts than you did. PKZIP 2.04g (which at the time _was_
             | the standard) supported split archives, in January 1993.
             | WinZip added support in version 8.1, in 2001.
             | 
             | Edit: I just found the page where you got your quote. Looks
             | like ISO was deliberately defining a subset of ZIP.
        
           | fogihujy wrote:
           | ARJ had that feature and it predates RAR by a few years.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | I don't know, but I think such feature would be way less
           | valuable today.
        
             | tener wrote:
             | There are niche uses, mostly with some forms of file
             | sharing with limited file size. For example email
             | attachments, but not only this.
        
             | sitzkrieg wrote:
             | true but its still used heavily on eg usenet binaries, and
             | nzb tools run the 100s of unrar for you not unlike the gui
        
           | scaladev wrote:
           | Caught up? tar has had this for a few billion years at least:
           | $ tar cazf - file1 file2 | split -b 700m - out.tgz
           | 
           | 7zip also natively supports splitting for as long as I can
           | remember.
        
             | progval wrote:
             | You didn't address this:
             | 
             | > or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs
             | 
             | How would you use 'split' without either dumping the whole
             | archive on disk or pluggin all drives at the same time?
        
               | epmos wrote:
               | tar was designed for tape, so you can specify a volume
               | size for the output and it will break it's output into
               | segments of that size. Using split isn't required.
               | 
               | The options in gnu tar are -L and -M for specifying tape
               | length (in KB) and creating multi-volume archives.
               | 
               | The -L version is handy as it can prompt you to change
               | the "tape". It has built-in tape handling as well, if you
               | are using a real tape that can be controlled via mt.
               | 
               | Apparently (just checked info) it supports an arbitrary
               | command to execute at the end of each archive. That would
               | be handy for burning CDs, though I don't remember that
               | feature from when I used floppies or QIC-40 to move files
               | from one machine to another.
               | 
               | Around 1991-ish I would use these options to put archives
               | onto stacks of floppy disks. The floppies didn't have a
               | filesystem, just blocks of tar archive. In the days of
               | 9600 bps modems, this was often the fastest way to move
               | stuff to another machine. I had an often-reused stack of
               | 3.5in HD floppies labeled with numbers for this purpose.
        
         | Mojave3 wrote:
         | I mostly use 7zip but I've had a number of archives in the past
         | that would simply not properly extract using 7zip and WinRAR
         | had no issues with. 7zip is fine, however I don't see it as
         | superior really in any notable way. I don't understand why
         | everyone is crazy over it at this point. It's good, but so is
         | WinRAR. Why is it sad for people to use one good program over
         | the other when they both accomplish the same thing in about the
         | same way? There's very little special about 7zip for typical
         | day to day use.
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | Does 7-zip support multiple processors like pbzip2 or similar
       | tools?
        
         | LinuxBender wrote:
         | [Update / Edit] I just spun up a VM with 20 cores and p7zip
         | uses all of them without any flags. Version 16.02 from the EPEL
         | repo.
         | 
         | No idea how this new build differs.
        
       | sumtechguy wrote:
       | I love the 'Some bugs were fixed.' in the changelog
       | 
       | Almost every release.
        
       | ixtli wrote:
       | Is there a non-sourceforge mirror? My pi.hole lists block that
       | domain, and likely for good reason.
        
         | hansel_der wrote:
         | lol
         | 
         | yea, sourceforge went throu a lot of sketchy shit but nothing
         | an adblocker and common sense could not defeat.
        
           | moistbar wrote:
           | For a while they were bundling in spyware with popular
           | downloads, which would not have been stopped by an adblocker,
           | and common sense would have dictated it wasn't there to begin
           | with. They've since stopped now that the site has changed
           | hands again, as far as I know.
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | About a month ago, the cross-platform product I support had a
       | group of developers considering standardizing on 7-Zip, only to
       | realize that p7zip - what most Linux users consider 7-Zip - is
       | actually a 3rd party project. Had this come out a month ago, it
       | might have actually swayed their decision.
        
       | qalmakka wrote:
       | I hope 7-Zip will support Zstandard someday, .tar.zst is getting
       | more and more common and having to point people on Windows to
       | install either modern7z (7z plugin for several new compression
       | algorithms) or use zstd from the CLI is complicated.
        
         | omgtehlion wrote:
         | https://www.tc4shell.com/en/7zip/modern7z/
         | 
         | windows-only, though (and 3rd-party)...
        
           | qalmakka wrote:
           | That's exactly what I quoted in my comment. It's not
           | necessary on Linux though, given that every environment ships
           | a good archiving program (like Ark or File Roller) that
           | supports zstandard.
        
         | sigzero wrote:
         | I have never seen a .zst file. Just a comment.
        
           | chungy wrote:
           | They're becoming increasingly common, especially if you ever
           | pay attention to Linux packaging.
        
             | moistbar wrote:
             | The majority that I've seen have been .tar.xz
        
         | kiririn wrote:
         | I've always been confused by the popular choice of compression
         | on tar archives. If a small portion of a gz, xz, zst, etc
         | archive is corrupted you lose everything after it, defeating
         | the purpose of using a stream format like Tar.
         | 
         | The algorithms that can recover data after the corruption like
         | bzip2 and lzip don't see much use these days
        
           | dTal wrote:
           | 99.9% of the time, if a .tar.gz archive is corrupted, I don't
           | _want_ to recover the data - I want to redownload it from a
           | different mirror because it 's source code and it probably
           | won't work with any corruption at all.
        
           | __s wrote:
           | Two reasons:
           | 
           | - if you know tar supports your directory / metadata, you
           | don't have to lookup if zst will preserve that info
           | 
           | - interfile compression
           | 
           | I don't think people would say they use tar because it's a
           | stream format. They use it because it packages
           | files/directories into a file
        
       | foobarbecue wrote:
       | By the way, do people use unar? It's a great solution I stumbled
       | upon for when you want to be like "I don't know or care how this
       | was compressed, just extract it for me"
        
         | chenxiaolong wrote:
         | I use bsdtar for a similar purpose. It's part of the fantastic
         | libarchive[1] project and supports every format I've thrown at
         | it so far.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.libarchive.org/
        
       | Koshkin wrote:
       | 7-Zip is the first of the three programs I install on Windows
       | before anything else (the other two being VLC and Sumatra PDF; I
       | wish Sumatra were available on Linux, but evince is not bad as a
       | replacement).
        
         | ziml77 wrote:
         | 7-Zip is the first thing I install alongside Firefox and
         | Everything Search. Firefox is less of an absolute requirement
         | with Chromium Edge but I need 7-Zip and Everything Search.
        
         | ducktective wrote:
         | Take a look at Zathura.
         | 
         | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Iz4zdyRM4
        
       | kd913 wrote:
       | Why though? There are already plenty of free tools to do this.
       | 
       | unzip,zip,tar,gunzip,ark
        
         | Theodores wrote:
         | Brotli. My new goto.
        
         | compressedgas wrote:
         | Those don't use LZMA. For LZMA there is 7z, xz, and lzip.
        
           | usefulcat wrote:
           | Also pixz, which can use multiple threads for decompression.
        
           | biglost wrote:
           | lrzip :-D
        
         | I_Byte wrote:
         | I have noticed that 7-zip offers the best compression ratio out
         | of the options you listed above when set for maximum
         | compression. I personally am happy to hear this news.
        
           | krzyk wrote:
           | Better than xz?
           | 
           | And what's the difference? I alwasy though 7zip was a bit
           | sketchy like rar archives, zips are more common on windows
           | and on linux everywhere I see there are either gz, bz2 or xz.
        
         | fanatic2pope wrote:
         | Keeping the options for those straight is why one of my most
         | used command line programs seems to be atool.
         | 
         | https://www.nongnu.org/atool/
        
           | JonathonW wrote:
           | I like the current bsdtar-- it's libarchive [1] based, and
           | supports a bunch of formats (including your typical tarball
           | formats, but also zip, 7zip, and rar archives, amongst
           | others).
           | 
           | [1] https://www.libarchive.org/
        
         | harshreality wrote:
         | tar supports xz and even zstd now, but it's not clear those are
         | better for all purposes than 7zip, especially since .7z is more
         | likely to work on other OSes than .tar.compressionextension
        
           | LinuxBender wrote:
           | xz is almost identical compression _depending on flags used_
           | but lacks encryption. Some people use 7zip to also encrypt
           | their files.
        
         | kumarsw wrote:
         | I'm assuming it's because 7-zip (1) has widespread use on other
         | platforms (2) supports solid compression and (3) is efficient
         | for randomly access. There is DAR which does (2) and (3) but
         | not cross-platform and is already esoteric on *nix platforms.
        
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