7-Zip (p7zip)

A high compression-ratio archive program.

7-Zip uses the LZMA and LZMA2 algorithms (also used by xz) to reach excellent compression ratios. p7zip is the unofficial port of 7-Zip to Linux and other Unix systems and is widely used for handling .7z archives that are common in Windows-originated software distributions. The 7z command-line tool also handles zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, and other formats.

The 7z format itself supports solid archives (multiple files treated as a single stream for better compression), strong encryption (AES-256), arbitrary file attributes, and split archives. It is one of the better archive formats for "compress this large directory tree as small as possible".

Igor Pavlov develops 7-Zip on Windows; p7zip on Linux is a community port that has had several stewards over the years. The licence is LGPL-2.1-or-later with an "unRAR" exception clause. For everyday tar.gz / tar.xz workflows, native tar handles everything; 7z is most often reached for when interoperating with Windows users or unpacking software downloads in 7z format.

License: LGPL-2.1-or-later (with unRAR exception)

Category: CLI tools

Website: https://www.7-zip.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install p7zip-full
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install p7zip
Arch:          sudo pacman -S p7zip
macOS:         brew install p7zip

Authors

Igor Pavlov (creator of 7-Zip)

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