The algorithms that can recover data after the corruption like bzip2 and lzip don’t see much use these days

- if you know tar supports your directory / metadata, you don't have to lookup if zst will preserve that info

- interfile compression

I don't think people would say they use tar because it's a stream format. They use it because it packages files/directories into a file

If I expect I may have to deal with some form of data corruption (such as long-term archival media), I'd rather add a layer such as PAR2 [0]. Rather than content myself with "if the tar file is corrupted, I can probably recover most of the contents", erasure coding gives me confidence that I can definitely recover all of the contents, with confidence they're not corrupted, as long as I have enough parity data.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd/releases

windows-only, though (and 3rd-party)...

The fact .tar.zst or .tzst isn't supercommon (yet) is for the same reason .tar.xz took years to become widely adopted: lots of OSes still ship `tar`s that don't support it out of the box, like Windows (which only supports gzip actually) and macOS (which ships an old version of bsdtar and no libzst). On a reasonably new Linux, is like opening every other kind of tar.

In what way?

And when you run an executable from it, it (I think) unzips the whole archive, not just the file, so DLLs etc. can be loaded properly. Just saves some effort and thinking when you need it and doesn't make a difference when you don't

Dolphin, PCManFM, and MC would all like a word with you.

Also, 7Zip is no harder to use than the built-in Windows zip extractor if you use the context menu.

There's Double Commander, which also works great on Windows and beats sibling-mentioned Dolphin and even PCManFM hands down.

There's also Ranger and nnn, if you need a CLI and don't want an orthodox file manager.

If this is true (and I wouldn't know because I haven't had a GUI file manager on my Linux desktop since the early 2000s), it's because GUI file managers are for casuals.

And very annoyingly, 7zip has had for years a race condition where when you open a file inside an archive, it extracts the file in the temporary folder and then... it deletes it before the associated application manages to load it. It is hit and miss when it works - often it does, but then for some reason i haven't figured out it just deletes the file. And related to that 7zip extracts only the file you double click on, so e.g. it doesn't extract any data files an executable might need or images or subpages an HTML file may refer to.

I have both installed and in my experience WinRAR is by far the better tool when it comes to handling archives with the main exception (and the only reason i have 7zip installed) being that 7zip supports extracting from far more archive formats - including disk images (i use it all the time to extract files from VirtualBox, PCem, etc disk images and seems to support a variety of file systems too).

I’m not dissing Igor Pavlov. He’s a very skilled developer as for compression format development. But he ought to get some assistance on the archiver software front.

In 2015 ISO published a standard pertaining to zip archives, and one of the specifications was (from Wikipedia):

  Archives may not span multiple volumes or be segmented.

Edit: I just found the page where you got your quote. Looks like ISO was deliberately defining a subset of ZIP.

  $ tar cazf - file1 file2 | split -b 700m - out.tgz

> or copy it to multiple flash drives or CDs

How would you use 'split' without either dumping the whole archive on disk or pluggin all drives at the same time?

The options in gnu tar are -L and -M for specifying tape length (in KB) and creating multi-volume archives.

The -L version is handy as it can prompt you to change the "tape". It has built-in tape handling as well, if you are using a real tape that can be controlled via mt.

Apparently (just checked info) it supports an arbitrary command to execute at the end of each archive. That would be handy for burning CDs, though I don't remember that feature from when I used floppies or QIC-40 to move files from one machine to another.

Around 1991-ish I would use these options to put archives onto stacks of floppy disks. The floppies didn't have a filesystem, just blocks of tar archive. In the days of 9600 bps modems, this was often the fastest way to move stuff to another machine. I had an often-reused stack of 3.5in HD floppies labeled with numbers for this purpose.

The only way I've seen RAR used in torrents is to package everything into one big file, and since they're usually video or audio that already has lossy compression, and since I may want to prioritize or skip certain files, it's both pointless and annoying.

Winrar does it fine.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V_Iz4zdyRM4

Edit: read the description, so it is a different port, any any apparent enhancements though?

[1]: https://www.7-zip.org/download.html

I guess that would be why. I, too, assumed we had an actively maintained Linux port, but if the maintainer isn't doing much these days, a version closer to upstream would be great.

The 7zip author by his own admission does not use Linux, though, so I'd be curious if p7zip might actually be more performant on Linux.

Is there much to do?

In the site that you linked:

>p7zip is the command line version of 7-Zip for Linux / Unix, made by an independent developer.

In the link for this post:

>It's first version of my port of 7-Zip to Linux.

>That port of 7-Zip is similar to p7zip, but it's not identical to p7zip.

[1] https://www.libarchive.org/

Almost every release.

yea, sourceforge went throu a lot of sketchy shit but nothing an adblocker and common sense could not defeat.

unzip,zip,tar,gunzip,ark

And what's the difference? I alwasy though 7zip was a bit sketchy like rar archives, zips are more common on windows and on linux everywhere I see there are either gz, bz2 or xz.

xz is a much simplified version of the massively, insanely over-engineered and frankly impossible to implement 7-Zip format.

https://www.nongnu.org/atool/

[1] https://www.libarchive.org/

No idea how this new build differs.