Compression Utility: 7-Zip v4.23 is out

Compression Utility: 7-Zip v4.23 is out

7-Zip is an open-source file compression utility predominantly for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It is now also available for the Linux Platform. It operates either as a command line program or with a graphical user interface. It also features integration with the Windows shell environment. 7-Zip is free software, distributed under the GNU LGPL license. Several attempts over the last 2 years have been made to port this onto Linux and one such example is p7zip. The spring 2005 release of KDE will officially be the first Unix desktop environment to support 7-Zip. It is a competitor to the market-leading WinZip and WinRAR programs, both of which are closed source.

7-Zip introduced the flexible 7z file format, but it also supports a number of other compressed and uncompressed archive file formats, including zip, Microsoft cabinet (cab) files, rar, arj, gzip, bzip2, tar, cpio, rpm, and Debian deb archives. Due to legal issues, the ace format is not supported anymore. 7-Zip is also able to create self-extracting archive files when used with the 7z format.

By default, the program creates files in the 7z archive format (with the file extension .7z) using the LZMA algorithm for compression. These defaults allow the program to achieve the highest compression ratio compared to other popular high compression formats such as ACE and RAR, which are based on older, proprietary algorithms. Such files have the MIME-type application/x-7z-compressed.

For ZIP and gzip files, 7-Zip uses a modified implementation of the DEFLATE algorithm that is tuned for higher compression levels at the expense of speed. This implementation is also used in the AdvanceCOMP tools.

The latest version 7-Zip v4.23 is out and available for download. The changelog is somewhat modest:

- Drag and Drop support
- 7-Zip File Manager now can copy files from one archive to another
- Some bugs were fixed
- New localizations: Extremaduran, Malay