7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. Usually, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression. Supported formats - Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR. Unpacking only: 7z, ZIP, RAR, GZIP, GZ, BZIP2, BZ2, TAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, LHA, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, CPIO, DMG, FAT, HFS, LZMA, NTFS, SPLIT, SWM, TAZ, TBZ, TBZ2, TGZ, TPZ, VHD, XAR, XZ, Z and NSIS. For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip. Self-extracting capability for 7z format. Integration with Windows Shell. Powerful File Manager. Localizations for 70 languages. Version 15.06b and higher now supports RAR5 format!
Powerful command line version Plugin for FAR Manager 7-Zip works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7. There is a port of the command line version to Linux/Unix. Compression ratio results are very dependent upon the data used for the tests.
The main features of 7z format: Open architecture High compression ratio Strong AES-256 encryption Ability to use any compression, conversion or encryption method Supports files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB Unicode file names Solid compression Archive header compression
7z has an open architecture, so it can support any new compression method, too. The following methods currently are integrated into 7z: LZMA - Improved and optimized version of LZ77 algorithm PPMD - Dmitry Shkarin's PPMdH with small changes BCJ - Converter for 32-bit x86 executables BCJ2 - Converter for 32-bit x86 executables BZip2 - Standard BWT algorithm Deflate - Standard LZ77-based algorithm
LZMA is the default and general compression method of 7z format. The main features of LZMA are: High compression ratio Variable dictionary size (up to 4 GB) Compression speed: about 1 MB/s on 2 GHz CPU Decompression speed: about 10-20 MB/s on 2 GHz CPU Small memory requirement for decompression (depend from dictionary size) Small code size for decompression: about 5 KB Supports multi-threading and P4's hyper-threading
