7-Zip
I’ve written about 7-Zip before; but since we’re on the verge of a significant improvement I felt it was time to highlight it again.
7-Zip is a file archiver written by Igor Pavlov. Originally only available for Windows, but now available for most every operating system.
7-Zip was one of the first archiving tools to include LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm); and consistently demonstrated much higher compression ratios at much higher compression rates than any other compression scheme.
The next release of 7-Zip (9.10) will include LZMA2.
The source code for the LZMA SDK has been put into the public domain, and is freely available for use in other products. The SDK includes the main line C++ course, ANSI-C compatible LZMA and XV source code; C# LZMA compression and decompression source code; Java LZMA compression and decompression source code; as well as other source code.
You can read all the features of LZMA as well as download the Windows version of 7-Zip and locate links for pZip for *nix operating systems. You can also do a search for tvx or vx for *nix based systems as well.
This is the only archive utility you need; it would have been nice had Microsoft chosen to base the folder compression in Windows 7 on the LZMA SDK, or at least made it easy to replace the compression module; but 7-Zip installs a Windows shell extension so you have a separate (though confusing for some) menu item for compression and decompression.
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