Software Review: 7-Zip Compression Utility

Program: 7-Zip, version 4.57
Publisher: Igor Pavlov www.7-zip.org
Category: Compression/Decompression Archiving Utility

7-zip is open-source software and is licensed under a user-friendly license. You can download it for free and use it for free, including redistribute it (as long as you include the license with it).

I've been trying 7-Zip recently as an alternative to Filzip — ot because I've become dissatisfied with Filzip, but because some readers recommended it to me.

Let's look at an example — using 7-Zip to look at, and extract, 7-Zip. One of the ways you can download 7-Zip is as an .EXE executable file, so it can be installed by running the file. Interestingly, it can extract itself out of its .EXE file. However, this ability doesn't mean that it can unpack other .EXE files that are actually install programs.

In this first image, we see the directory into which I have downloaded the .exe installation program for 7-Zip.

First, I select the 7z457.exe file (7z457 = 7-zip, version 4.57 — I like their file naming system). Then, I clicked the Extract menu bar icon and let it create the unpacked directory right there.

Now, I can see the original 7z457.exe program and the folder that I created in the Extract step.

I double-clicked on the 7z457 folder icon, so the program now shows the contents of the directory. At this point, I would have to create my own shortcuts on the desktop and Start Menu for 7-Zip.

Unzipping zipped files, or other compressed files, works just like the example with the .EXE above.

7-Zip can also be used to create compressed archives, not just .zip files, but also 7-Zip (.7z), GZip (.gz), BZip2 (.bz2), and TAR (.tar) files.

7-Zip can unpack the following types and can be set as the default file handler for them, too: 7z, arj, bz2, bzip2, cab, cpio, deb, gz, gzip, iso, lha, lzh, rar, rpm, split, swm, tar, taz, tbz, tbz2, tgz, tpz, wim, z and zip.


I found that 7-Zip is easy to use, although not quite as obvious as Filzip. I found Filzip to be more intuitive because of it's dual-window-panel structure, similar to that of Windows Explorer. Although 7-Zip has a view option to select 2-panel, they are independent panels.