[POLL] What archive formats can you open readily?

[bcs86]

The results of this poll are important to me and of likely interest to other contributors.
The topic is more about what formats you are able to open without downloading additional software.

I want to use formats that compress better than .zip in my board attachments, but in many cases it would require you to download extra software.

The poll runs forever and you may re-vote to keep it up to the moment.

Please no spamming or trolling on this thread. If you have a reason to post let it be to tell of what computer archives you can read.

[Fluffers]

Why is there no .rar? =P

[Jaxad0127]

Why is there no .rar? =P

It's proprietary. And before you complain about 7z, it's LGPL.

[confuciousnz]

zip isn't so openly used anymore, 7z on the otherhand is gaining some footing. All the others I've never heard of.

[Crush]

I can recommend 7zip from www.7-zip.org for windows users. It supports really a lot of packing formats, especially typical UNIX formats like tar.bz2 or tar.gz which are usually not supported by typical unpacker applications on windows. And it is free open source software.

[EJlol]

I prefer .rar

[Crush]

The problem with rar is that only the unpacking algorithm is free. The packing algorithm is not publically available.

[bcs86]

7zip compresses brutally well. I hope it becomes more popular. You would still need to open tar because I think 7zip only does compression, not archiving. It strips file meta data by itself.

If everyone could readily open 7zipped tape archives It would have great benefits saving bandwidth.

A drawback of 7zip is that its text interface is not familiar to users of gzip and bzip2.
File-roller (gnome) unpacks it in 2 steps instead of one. (uncompress, then you have to extract).

There's another archive format I didn't list called dar. I see it as being mostly for disk backups and very unlike tar.
It's unlikely that many people can open dar as of yet.

EDIT: 'lzma' seems to be squishing stuff a tad better than 7zip and has a gzip-like text interface with options -1 to -9 for the speed vs. compression ratio.

[Kage]

IMO, .tar.gz is my preferred archive format. Its fast and has decent compression.

The only draw back is that sometimes the tar format can sometimes play games with filesystems. (like making files owners of users that don't exist).

[Turmfalke]

[quote="Kage"]IMO, .tar.gz is my preferred archive format. Its fast and has decent compression.

The only draw back is /quote]
-xzvf I love fully self-explanatory switches

[Platyna]

tar FTW!