Concept
Comparison of file archivers
Related concepts (7)
Cabinet (file format)
Cabinet (or CAB) is an for Microsoft Windows that supports lossless data compression and embedded digital certificates used for maintaining archive integrity. Cabinet files have .cab s and are recognized by their first four bytes (also called their ) MSCF. Cabinet files were known originally as Diamond files. A CAB archive can contain up to 65,535 folders (distinct to standard operating system directories), each of which can contain up to 65,535 files for a maximum of 4,294,836,225.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a free and open-source , a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others. The program can be used from a Windows graphical user interface that also features shell integration, from a Windows command-line interface as the command 7za or 7za.exe, and from POSIX systems as p7zip. Most of the 7-Zip source code is under the LGPL-2.
Deflate
In computing, Deflate (stylized as DEFLATE) is a lossless data compression that uses a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. It was designed by Phil Katz, for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool. Deflate was later specified in RFC 1951 (1996). Katz also designed the original algorithm used to construct Deflate streams. This algorithm was patented as , and assigned to PKWARE, Inc. As stated in the RFC document, an algorithm producing Deflate files was widely thought to be implementable in a manner not covered by patents.
ZIP (file format)
ZIP is an that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. This format was originally created in 1989 and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc.'s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous compression format by Thom Henderson. The ZIP format was then quickly supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP.
Gzip
gzip is a and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU (from where the "g" of gzip is derived). Version 0.1 was first publicly released on 31 October 1992, and version 1.0 followed in February 1993. The decompression of the gzip format can be implemented as a streaming algorithm, an important feature for Web protocols, data interchange and ETL (in standard pipes) applications.
Tar (computing)
In computing, tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one , often referred to as a tarball, for distribution or backup purposes. The name is derived from "tape archive", as it was originally developed to write data to sequential I/O devices with no file system of their own. The archive data sets created by tar contain various parameters, such as name, timestamps, ownership, file-access permissions, and directory organization. POSIX abandoned tar in favor of pax, yet tar sees continued widespread use.
Lossless compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes).