COMPRESSION
7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP, WIM, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR, Z.
"Usually, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs."
FLEXABLE
The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or with a window-based shell integration. 7z files can support archives up to 16000000000 GB in size. While .7z files are designed to be opened and extracted with 7-Zip, other popular compression archival tools can read, compress, and decompress the archives as well.
7-Zip is able to open some MSI files, allowing access to the meta-files within along with the main contents. Some Microsoft CAB (LZX compression) and NSIS (LZMA) installer formats can be opened. Similarly, some Microsoft executable programs (.EXEs) which are self-extracting archives or otherwise contain archived content (e.g., some setup files) may be opened as archives.
CROSS PLATFORM
Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh operating systems and variants are supported. The 7za.exe version of 7-Zip is available for Unix-like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X), FreeDOS, OpenVMS and AmigaOS 4 under the name p7zip, also developed and maintained by Pavlov (7-zip).
DEVELOPER
Windows
File Association
Microsoft Windows Users: Associate 7zFM.exe with *.7z files. 7zFM.exe is the GUI front end for 7z in Windows out of the three exe files, 7z.exe 7zG.exe and 7zFM.exe in the installation directory.