7-Zip is a popular, powerful, and versatile file archive utility that you can use to compress or decompress files and folders. The free and open source software is something of a Swiss Army Knife utility, able to open ZIP, gzip, tar, and RAR files, along with a many others. You can also use its 7z file compression format.

The first version of 7-zip was released in 1999, and in recent years the developer has taken to releasing a new version with additional features and performance improvements about once a year.

One thing has been consistent until now though: 7-Zip was a Windows-only application. But now the developer has released the first official builds of 7-Zip for Linux.

7-Zip 21.01 alpha was released this week, and it’s the first version of the file archiving software that’s available for both Windows and Linux. The 7-Zip download page now has links for 32-bit, 64-bit, x86, and ARM processors for both operating systems.

The Linux version of 7-Zip can perform all the same actions as the Windows version of 7-zip, but it’s only available as a command line utility for now. Windows users can choose between using a command prompt or graphical user interface.

While is the first official build of 7-Zip for Linux, there’s been an unofficial port of 7-Zip for Linux called p7zip available for several years. The developer of 7-Zip says the official build is “similar to p7zip, but it’s not identical.”

According to the 7-Zip release notes, other changes in version 21.01 alpha include speed improvements for ARM64 hardware and bug fixes.

via gHacks

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6 replies on “7-Zip is now available for Linux (after more than two decades as a Windows exclusive)”

  1. The official Windows 7zfm build has been running flawlessly under Wine since 1999, so there hasn’t been much motivation to create a Linux version.

  2. I don’t use 7z archives but I do use 7-Zip as my sole archive utility in Windows. On Linux, I just use the usual/typical archive formats associated with Linux. I think 7z supports multi-threading/processing which I wanted for Linux until I found multi-thread/process utilities for xz archives.

    It’s nice that there’s an official Linux port though. It seems p7zip hasn’t been maintained for several years now.

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