I 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.
WinRAR also seems to handle opening a file in an external app without manually extracting much better. I can just double-click a file in an archive and open it in an external app, while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file. Rather annoying if you're just trying to quickly check something like the readme.txt in an archive.
>while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file.
No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.
.tar itself gives you enough information to seek forward past each file, though every file must be visited.
.gz does not give you enough information to randomly seek within the big compressed .gz file, so you cannot skip past files within a .tar archive.
But if you load a .gz file and consume the entire stream, but keep periodic checkpoints of your past sliding window (about 64KB) every 1MB or so, you can get random access with 1MB granularity. You still had to consume the entire stream to build the lookup though.
For 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.
Perhaps 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.
There is also NanaZip which aims to be a more modern Windows application and I think also incorporates the additions of the 7zs fork https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
7-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.
Windows 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.)
ZIP 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.
it 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)
It 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.
It 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.
Readit News
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.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps(2f)FileRoller.html
No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.
tar.gz files don't have a central directory (like zip), and they are compressed as one stream (almost always non-seekable)
.gz does not give you enough information to randomly seek within the big compressed .gz file, so you cannot skip past files within a .tar archive.
But if you load a .gz file and consume the entire stream, but keep periodic checkpoints of your past sliding window (about 64KB) every 1MB or so, you can get random access with 1MB granularity. You still had to consume the entire stream to build the lookup though.
[1]: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd
[1]: https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
Sometimes you see a word used a new way and wonder if you've just been wrong all these years.
You'll see codec used in things like text encoding.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/
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)
In 11 (and maybe later 10 updates) they added 7z and rar support.
It didn't ship in the distant past due to anti-competitive reasons but it is there now.