"7z" or "7-Zip" may refer either to the open-source 7z compression container format or to the file name of the executable program of the same name that is the flagship implementation of the compression format. Both are GPL-licensed and under active development.
"7z" or "7-Zip" may refer either to the open-source 7z compression container format or to the file name of the executable program of the same name that is the flagship implementation of the compression format. Both are GPL-licensed and under active development.
The 7z format is a compressed archive file format that supports several different data compression, encryption and pre-processing algorithms. The LZMA SDK 4.62 was placed in the public domain in December 2008. The latest stable version of 7-Zip and LZMA SDK is version 18.05. The MIME type of 7z is application/x-7z-compressed.
The 7-Zip program is an open source file archiver. 7-Zip operates with the 7z archive format, but can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or with Microsoft Windows shell integration. 7-Zip's development began in 1999, and it is actively developed by Igor Pavlov. It is related to a cross-platform port, p7zip. 7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It was the winner of the SourceForge.net 2007 community choice awards for "Technical Design" and for "Best Project".
7z has an open architecture, so it can support any new compression methods. Now the following methods are integrated to 7z:
- LZMA: Improved and optimized version of LZ77 algorithm
- LZMA2: Improved version of LZMA
- PPMD: Dmitry Shkarin's PPMdH with small changes
- BCJ: Converter for 32-bit x86 executables
- BCJ2: Converter for 32-bit x86 executables
- BZip2: Standard BWT algorithm
- Deflate: Standard LZ77-based algorithm
