Do people still use WinRar? :O
Heck, WinZip still makes new releases so I'm sure people still use that too.
Genuine question: what are the better alternatives?
I think that they also support more archive formats and they even have their own open format 7z.
Based on their own claims, there are also faster and more efficient than Winrar.
I'm amazed at all the comments calling for 7zip as the one and only. winrar works just fine so does windows zip function. If you have an edge case, yeah then you need something that can handle it.
This is the biggest joke of win32 system, how on earth after so many decades of breaking things this is still default?
The size of the field in these APIs is a fixed maximum length and can't be changed, because that would break everything. If an app called into the kernel and got a string longer than 260 chars back, then boom, instant buffer overflow.
There are other, newer Win32 APIs for all of these that don't have that limitation, but apps have to be changed to use them.
But, they're only accept file paths this long if those paths begin with the magic sequence \\?\ [0]. So each "normal" path has to be "normalized" to this format in order to be longer than 260 characters. This is a usually a trivial operation of appending this sequence, but it's slightly much complicated than it looks, and also not well known for some reason.
I'm not aware of any newer APIs that can natively accept long path names, btw,
The Windows Explorer shell, and so the standard Open File dialog used by most application, uses the "non-normalized" form without the magic prefix, and so can't be used to view, delete or create those long paths. So to bring this discussion back to the original post: 7zip is very good to have on your system if only to be used as a viewer for files on those long paths, and in order to delete them, since Windows explorer can't...
Incidentally, the other common application which can handle long paths is git for windows.
As for the much hyped ability in Windows 10 to enable the support natively : it's still not enabled by default, so you can't count on it being present on user's machines.
BTW, I'm using an open source library for dotnet called Zeta Long Path, which does exactly this (appending this magic sequence) and works wonderfully well, even on Windows XP. But you're right that most people who use those APIs directly usually allocate a 260 char array and use it, and if Microsoft would suddenly change the behavior and started returning actual long paths then those applications would blow up.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming...
I used to use 7zip, but switched when I discovered that Peazip doesn't extract to a temporary directory when extracting (thus, saving extra I/O work). It directly extracts into the target directory.
Moving many (small) files can also be quite slow
I thought the creation of the files in the temp directory was an unavoidable artifact of how drag-and-drop worked in Windows. If peazip can get around this, I might check it out.
7-Zip covers the majority of other formats you're likely to encounter.
If I recall correctly WinRAR can make self extracting archives pretty easily. If you use that feature it might be easier/better to just continue using WinRAR.
I love the fact that small software companies like RARLAB can still exist.
WinZIP, too: https://www.winzip.com/win/en/lanall.html
For decompression only. 7zip can work with these too. In fact 7zip (unlike winrar) can even create some of them.
Granted, it's also famous for (supposedly) nobody ever paying for it, which doesn't exactly lend itself to staying in business.
They could at any point have changed the software to prevent it from functioning after the trial has expired - they're not going to be so naive to think people will all pay just because of a prompt that can be easily dismissed.
First of all, I very much doubt that the people who use winrar even notice the UI. They could switch to 7zip and feel right at home. People are used to UI changing drastically all the time, both from Windows itself, and from websites. Some of them complain about it, but even they adjust.
Second, I said nothing about "another compression algorithm". All the big compression software on Windows support each other's algorithms, but 7zip is free and winrar makes you pay for it. Also the people who use winrar don't care about compression algorithms in the first place, only that they get a file they can email and the other people can double-click to extract.
Third, the reality of the situation is that most people who use winrar are also the kind that use the trial version indefinitely. The more clued ones switch to pirated copies from piratebay et al. I'd rather people use 7zip than pirated copies, both for their safety and for RARLAB's benefit.
The reason these companies charge for things that are free is because they rely on users not knowing better, and the small fraction of users who do pay for it is sufficient to bankroll them. A 7zip user and a winrar user could be friends for life and the topic of "So what compression software do you use?" might never come up.
>If I recall correctly WinRAR can make self extracting archives pretty easily.
So can 7zip.
>I love the fact that small software companies like RARLAB can still exist.
You say this as if the alternatives are all big software companies. Last I checked, 7zip is still a one-person software.
Nope. 7-Zip feels very clunky. WinRAR is a lot smoother. People would notice that something feels "off", even if they couldn't tell you what specifically was wrong.
> You say this as if the alternatives are all big software companies. Last I checked, 7zip is still a one-person software.
Does that person make enough to live on?
https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/9...
I think I shamed someone out of using 7z recently by pointing out that if they claim to be trying to attract a broad audience of hobbyist developers, using a compression library that doesn’t exist on OS X (with out without Xcode) is not a smart plan. In this particular case you had to download two tools to use their code, and that just tore it for me.
When I went back recently they had switched to .xz, which does exist.