7-Zip 4.57

Publisher's description of 7-Zip 4.57

7-Zip is a free and open source file archiver designed originally for Microsoft Windows, and later made available to other computer operating systems. It supports .zip, .rar, .gzip, .gz, .iso and more!

7-Zip began in 2000 and is actively developed by Igor Pavlov. In contrast to the market-leading programs WinZip and WinRAR, which remain as proprietary competitors, 7-Zip is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (with the RAR license restrictions), and as such is free software.

7-Zip was the winner of the SourceForge.net 2007 community choice awards for "Technical Design" and for "Best Project."

7-Zip supports many features, some which may not be found in popular commercial compression software. For encryption, 7z archives support the 256-bit AES cipher. Encryption can be enabled for both files and the 7z directory structure. When the directory structure is encrypted, users are required to supply a password to see the filenames contained within the archive (unless the one who made the archive decided to not encrypt file names, but only data). WinZip developed AES encryption standard is also available to encrypt ZIP archives but doesn't offer filenames encryption like 7z.

7-Zip flexibly supports volumes of dynamically variable sizes, useful for backups on removable media such as writable CDs and DVDs.

When in 2-panel mode, 7-Zip can be considered a basic orthodox file manager.

7-Zip has the ability to unpack archives with corrupted filenames, renaming the files as required and lets users make self-extracting archives so that users who don't have the 7-Zip codec can still extract compressed files.