The Unarchiver v2.5
The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.
It is very simple to use and install - simply copy it into your Applications folder or whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver's preferences.
Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. The goal is to make The Unarchiver able to extract anything you give it. The Unarchiver uses the libxad unarchiving library to support many older, obscure formats.
Supported formats
| Format | Support level | Notes |
| Zip | Full | Full support for the normal zip format, with additional support for AES encryption, Zip64 extensions for large files, Mac OS extensions of many different kinds, and several unusual compression methods (Deflate64, Bzip, LZMA, PPMd). Can also extract .EXE self-extracting files using Zip. |
| RAR | Full | Including encryption and multiple volumes. Can also extract .EXE self-extracting files using RAR. |
| 7z | No encryption | Most compression methods are supported, but no encryption. Also supports Unix extensions. |
| LZH | Full | |
| Tar | Full | |
| Gzip | Full | |
| Bzip2 | Full | |
| StuffIt | No encryption | Can unpack all files I've been able to locate. |
| StuffIt X | Partial | Can unpack many files, some more obscure features are still unsupported. JPEG compression is also unsupported. |
| DiskDoubler | Almost full | Only lacks some old compression methods, because I have not been able to locate any files using these. If you have some that do not work, please post them here. |
| Compact Pro | No encryption | |
| PackIt | Full | |
| Cpio | Full | |
| XAR | Full | |
| RPM | Full | |
| LZMA, XZ | Full | |
| Compress (.Z) | Full | |
| CAB | Full | |
| MSI | Full | This format is also used by many other Microsoft formats, meanings that you can use The Unarchiver to extract internal data from DOC and PPT files, and others. There is probably no reason to do this, but you can. |
| NSIS | Extensive | Supports many different versions, starting from version 1.1o |
| ALZip | No encryption | Supports all known compression methods, including Bzip2, Deflate and obfuscated Deflate. |
| ARJ | No multi-part | |
| Ace | Only old files | No support for Ace 2.0 and up (WinAce). |
| Zoo | Full | |
| ADF | FFS | Can extract files from Amiga disk images using the regular FFS file system. |
| DMS | FFS | Can extract files from compressed Amiga disk images using the regular FFS file system. |
| LZX | Full | |
| PowerPacker | Full | |
| NSA, SAR | Partial | Can unpack all files I've found. If you have ones that do not unpack, please post an issue. |
| NDS | Full | Can extract files from Nintendo DS ROM images. |
| Split files | Basic | Can join files named .001, .002 that do not use any extra wrapper format. |
If you have a compressed file that The Unarchiver does not open, please post a bug on the bug tracker, and include the file in question, and I will look into whether it is possible to add support for it!
New in 2.5:
- Fixes unpacking of password-protected Zip files, which was broken in the last update.
- Source can now be built with a completely free implementation of RAR which works for all versions, including multimedia filters, avoiding the non-GPL-compatible unrar license. (There is also better support for ancient RAR 1.5 files.)
- Has a workaround for a Paragon NTFS bug that made unpacking on NTFS drives generate errors.
- Fixes for Tar and RPM files.
- There are now two command-line utilities available, unar and lsar, which can be used to unpack and list archives, respectively. They are still in development and not really feature-complete, but they should work. These are available as precompiled binaries for both OS X and Windows on the download page, and can also be built on Linux.
New in 2.4:
- Support for Zip files missing their central directory. This makes it possible to recover more damaged Zip files.
- Support for more DiskDoubler files.
- Better handling of broken Tar files, such as those created by some versions of Ant.
- Bugfixes for the RAR and StuffIt decompressors.
- Fixed file association for .Z files.
- Italian and Danish translations, by Marco Rotatori and Søren Palmund.
- Some fixes for the handling of file permissions, to better match Archive Utility.
- Fixes to unpack giant .tar.gz files better.
- Optimized decompression of several older formats, such as LZH and StuffIt.
- Fixed a couple of bugs in the UI.
New in 2.3:
- Updated French localization by Ronald Leroux.
- Can now join simple split files (those named .001, .002 and so on).
- Supports MSI files. The same format is actually used for many Microsoft file types, so you can now also extract the internals of DOC or PPT files, among others. If you have some reason to.
- Much better support for DiskDoubler. Added two missing compression methods.
- Fixed CAB support, which was broken. Should now support all CAB files, including multi-part.
- Amiga LZX should work better.
- Supports more naming schemes for multi-part RAR files.
- Some other bugfixes.
New in 2.2:
- Korean and Simplified Chinese translations, by Chang-Beom Park and Tianhao He respectively.
- Support for the XZ compression format, along with support for embedded XZ in RPM and XAR files.
- Support for LZMA2 and some more filters in 7-zip.
- Support for NSA and SAR.
- Better support for unicode in Zip files, and some bugfixes for Korean.
- Better support for MacBinary in Zip.
- Fixed an issue where the final file in a Zip file created on OS X might get lost.
- More robust reading of gzip files.
- Fixed an issue with the interface, where the window was sometimes left open.
New in 2.1:
- Added a service for unarchiving files via the the Services menu, or when right-clicking files.
- Some interface tweaks (File menu now works in the preferences window, doesn't ask for destination directories for every archive, archives are not added to the queue twice).
- Proper quarantine propagation for downloaded files.
- Better support for very large Zip and 7-zip files.
- More RAR bugfixes.
- For programmers: The XADMaster library can now be compiled in 64 bit mode, but the The Unarchiver app itself is still only 32 bit.
New in 2.0.3:
- More speedups and bugfixes for encrypted RAR files.
New in 2.0.2:
- Sped up the RAR decryption code a lot.
- Fixed some issues with resource forks in .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 files.
New in 2.0.1:
- Should now handle concaternated bzip2 files.
- Fixes to the Japanese translation.
- Fixes to the LZMA parser.
New in 2.0:
- Support for many new formats and algorithms:
- Partial support for SITX archives. Most archives should open fine, but SITX's special JPEG compression is unsupported. (If you are a programmer and want to help out with getting this working, I'd be happy to hear from you!) Some preprocessing filters are also unsupported.
- Other new formats: XAR, ALZip, LZMA-utils, Compact Pro, PackIt, ARJ
- Encrypted RAR archives.
- WinZip-style encrypted Zip files using AES.
- Can decompile NSIS installers to get the files inside. This seems to work for versions all the way back to 1.1o or so, but a lot of guessing is involved so it might fail on some files.
- More compression types in Zip: Deflate64, bzip2, PPMd, LZMA.
- More compression types in DiskDoubler (but still not all).
- Better handling of 7-zip, RAR, LZH, tar and RPM files.
- Extracting files from several emulation formats, such as NDS and ADF.
- Bugfixes and streamlining for the user interface.
- Option for when to create folders for extracted files.
- Option for how to set the date of extracted folders.
New in 1.6.1:
- Leopard compatibility fixes.
New in 1.6:
- Fixed a bug that caused password-protected Zip archives to fail to extract.
- Added support for zip archives created by ZipIt.
- Added a Dutch localization by Jonathan.
- Fixed a rare RAR bug, and some GUI quirks.
New in 1.5:
- Fixed a bug that made it impossible to use The Unarchiver together with Xee on some computers.
- Added a Traditional Chinese localization by NitocTaiwan.
New in 1.4:
- Experimental support for Mac OS X 10.3.
- Support for pax archives, as found in Installer packages.
- Fixed a bug where large archives with lots of resource forks would cause massive memory use.
- Fixed some timezone-related bugs. Some format may still have problems getting the timestamps exactly right, however.
- Various other minor bugfixes.
New in 1.3:
- More localizations: Portugese and Russian. Thanks this time go to Nylson Coelho and Michael Krekin.
- Changed the modifier key for extract-to-foler: Either Shift or Option works now. Command was too easy to accidentially trigger when opening a file with Command-O.
- Fixed a bug where app bundles in StuffIt files would not run correctly after being extracted.
- Fixed a bug where The Unarchiver would hang when trying to extract particularly broken files.
- Fixed a bug where apps would be launched when the open-after-extracting option was on.
New in 1.2:
- Added several localizations: Japanese, German, French and Spanish. Many thanks to E-WA, Christoph Schmitz, Thomas Steffen, Thomas Didrel, and Oscar A. Mata T. for their work on this!
- Added an option to have The Unarchiver ask for a destination folder. Holding the command key while double-clicking an archive will also make The Unarchiver ask for a destination folder.
- Fixed many unarchiving bugs. Several problems with Zip files fixed, and SIT files should now work much better, especially on Intel machines.
- Fixed some other bugs in the interface, such as some problems with the filetype association list.
New in 1.1:
- Added options to automatically open extracted folders, and to automatically delete archives after extracting.
- Added an option to select which folder to extract to.
- Fixed the bug where the window would sometimes open below others.
- Fixed a number of extraction bugs.