The popular archive utility 7-Zip is now available natively on Linux.
Don’t unpack your excitement just yet: this is an alpha release, and we’re only taking about a command line client not a full-blown user-interface extravaganza.
Now, at first I was a bit: “is this news?”. I’ve memories of playing around with p7zip in the past. But that client, reader’s tell me, isn’t quite same thing. While it supports the .7z format it isn’t an official upstream thing. This build is that: the first official native version of 7-Zip for Linux.
Linux is not exactly short of tools that do (mostly) the same job as 7-Zip. But more choice is rarely a bad thing. 7-Zip is a fairly well-known app on the Windows scene, so having it available (in some form) on Linux could persuade some reticent Windows users to switch.
The release notes say the 7-Zip Linux build supports all the features that the latest 7-Zip Window version, albeit sans a GUI, including:
- High compression ratio in the new 7z format
- Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
- Unpacking only: AR, ARJ, Base64, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DMG, EXT, FAT, GPT, HFS,
IHEX, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, QCOW2, RAR,
RPM, SquashFS, UDF, UEFI, VDI, VHD, VMDK, XAR and Z. - Fast compression and decompression
- Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
If you’re interested in checking it out head over the 7zip downloads. There you’ll find two packages available for Linux: one for x86 processors and one for 64-bit ARM. Download the one you need, extract (using a different tool), then access it using your terminal emulator of choice:
Naturally you’ll need to learn some commands, so do check out the very comprehensive 7-Zip manual that comes with the tool.
You may wish to wait until a stable version of the 7-Zip Linux client is released I can say that the alpha version runs fine on my (Fedora rawhide, don’t tell Ubuntu) system without any major issue. That said, don’t entrust the tool with anything particularly critical just yet.
h/t Tim