So. I kind of like BOMArchiverHelper.app, the default OS X unzipping utility. However, it has quite a number of limitations. Most other unarchivers on OS X have interfaces that I don't like, or just don't work very well. Also, thanks to Windows' idiotic idea of using the current system encoding for filenames, I have tons of archives from Japan with Shift_JIS filenames, which none of the unarchivers on OS X I've tried will handle properly.

And so I, because I obviously don't have enough to do already, get the idea that I need to write a better unarchiver. Features I think it needs include:

• Handle as many formats as possible. Not just Zip and Tar-Gzip, but RAR, 7-Zip, LhA, StuffIt, and anything else you can think of.
• Handle non-UTF8 filenames, perferrably automatically.
• Have a simple and straightforward interface like BOMArchiveHelper.app.
• Not leave .tar files lying around when unpacking .tar.gz files and the like.
• As a side benefit, produce some code that can be re-used to add archive support to Xee (so this whole project doesn't just steal time I could be working on Xee instead).

For actual information on the current state of this project, read on!

>>715
Method A will expand with The Unarchiver
Method B will NOT expand with The Unarchiver
What would you like? Method B file and/or DD301
Both expand with DD301 and DD410

>>717

I guess the best would be both! I have an emulator somewhere that might run it but that's a pain to get running.

>>718
ok... I am sending dd301.zip
It has dd301, good Method A and trouble maker Method B

>>711

thanks for split file support.
it sucks when i have to keep 2 or 3 apps to do one thing.

>>719

Ah yes, method B is indeed method number 2, which is the one I still lack. (Method 5, too, but it's apparently the same as 2 just with another parameter.)

When I have some time to play with reverse engineering again I'll have a look at it. Thanks!

if i hit return after entering the password for an archive (instead of clicking ok) the whole program seems to freeze up. if i open another archive it will show up in the window but i can't do anything with it. if i double click the icon i get no preferences. a blank unarchiver window will just stay in the background and can't be force quit (or regular quit). it happens every time. this is a TERRIBLE bug and if it's been reported i apologize, for i don't have time to read through this thread, but it keeps me from using unarchiver as hitting return after typing is something ingrained in my mind.

>>722

Some people have reported similar problems, but I can not reproduce them, and thus can't figure out what is going wrong.

Do you have any haxies or anything similar installed? Do you have a second machine you can test to see if it has the same problem?

>>721
Any idea which version of dd had Method 5?

>>725

Nope, not really. Well, 3.0 seems to use 1 and 2, and 4.0 uses 6, 9 and 10, so maybe something in between? Although I noticed some of the other related programs might use other methods. And method 8 seems to be older than many of the others too (and is the same as in Compact Pro), so it's a bit of a mess.

I wanted to alert you to an issue that I ran into with Unarchiver. I tried to download a wireless broadband configuration application (you can get a copy of it here: http://www.clear.com/support/download -- d/l the Mac version 1.03.1031.0).

The problem was that the installation of that application failed. I was on the phone with that company's tech team multiple times and still could not get it to install properly (see attached image).

Then I happened to download it via Safari (which automatically opens zip file with the standard Mac OS X archive utility). Amazingly the installation worked that time.

The problem was related to the fact that I was always unzipping the file using The Unarchiver. And for some reason, TU was corrupting the .app file in the zip.

I thought I would let you know and let you take a look at the zip file in question.

I love TU, but in this one case it really messed me up for days.

>>727

Which version were you using? Try 2.3 if you haven't.

Regarding Issue 727 reported by "archecht"
Curiously ! I have done some tests myself (on OSX 10.6.2) and I have observed that if extracted with –

• Springy 1.6.1

both, Uninstall Script and Install Package, fail to work !

• The Unarchiver 2.3

Uninstall Script works but Install Package fails to install !

• Stuffit 14.0.1

both, Uninstall Script and Install Package, work !

• Apple Archive Utility

both, Uninstall Script and Install Package, work !
with the observation that Apple Archive Utility produces an Install Package with different size, if compared with those produced by the rest of the above utilities.

4 tools = 4 different results !?

Very mysterious. At what point exactly does the installer fail if extracted with The Unarchiver? I tried unpacking it, and it started fine but I didn't want to install any unknown software so I didn't go through with it.

Also, did you spot any obvious difference between the extracted contents of the installer?

>>730
my apologies ! because is no big problem
just that permissions were not set correctly by default when extracted with The Unarchiver and Springy !
sorry again ! I was rushed !

pigz is a reimplementation of gzip for multiple procs. Can you pretty please replace the gzip code with pigz?

http://www.zlib.net/pigz/

>>731

All right, I'll try to investigate it further.

>>732

> when compressing data

Decompressing deflate is pretty much impossible to do on multiple cores, unfortunately.

Answers to some of the questions 728-733...

>>728 I tried version 2.3 of TU, and it stills has this problem (install fails).

>>730 The install fails right at the start of installing any files, so you won't really be installing anything.

TU produces an installer that fails and is 6,939,287 bytes, and Apple Archive Utility produces one that works and is 6,894,913 bytes. Not sure without looking closely what the difference are.

>>735
Hello 'achecht', have you read post 731 ?!
There is no big error ! You just need to fix permissions for all enclosed folders and files ! You can use for this a graphical tool such as 'BatChmod'
Regarding size difference between TU and AU, I do not know why this difference, but both packages works !

First off, many thinks for enabling me to say NO to Stuffit. Second off, I saw some folks had been asking how to compile. I got it to compile on Snow Leopard (10.6.2) with XCode 3.2.1. I initially ran into problems with #include_next's, but found that by unsetting some of the user settings I could get it to compile. I'm a command line kinda guy, so here's the commands I used to build and install the app in /Applications after downloading TheUnarchiver2.3_src.zip:

unzip TheUnarchiver2.3_src.zip
cd The\ Unarchiver/The\ Unarchiver
xcodebuild \
    SDKROOT_i386= SDKROOT_ppc= SDKROOT_x86_64= \
    MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_i386= MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_ppc= MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET_x86_64= \
    GCC_VERSION_i386= GCC_VERSION_ppc= \
    HOME= DSTROOT=/ install
cd ../..
rm -fr The\ Unarchiver

I have a strange problem with The Unarchiver. When I download an .rar file, The UnArchiver automatically tries to unarchive it as soon as the file has completed downloading. I have found no way to shut this off. It is really annoying when downloading a multi *.rar set of files, because it will try to unarchive each part.

I'm using the latest Snow Leopard. Is it possible I have something set in the OS that is doing this to me?

Thanks!

>>739

It's probably a Safari option.

>>739
>>740

Try unchecking the Safari preference:

Safari > Preferences > General > Open "safe" files after downloading

This is a very useful program, thank you.

Very good!

some suggestions :

.HUD interface

.compression (it would be great !!!)

.DMG container

Bye!

>>744

>HUD interface

HUD windows have stupid behavior like always on top, so I'm against this. Also I believe that'd force Unarchiver to require Leopard or higher.

>compression

Try out http://www.kekaosx.com/en/

>DMG

Whats wrong with mounting it with OS X?

Not surprisingly, but Unarchiver doesn't care for the practice of concatenating a rar and a jpg.

Just making sure you know, Waha.

A suggestion.
Make it use the finder to "preview" archives w/o extracting them (I guess it would be something like "extract to RAM/temp folder" and then open it, and when the user closes the window, the RAM/temp folder contents gets deleted automatically).

I'm having trouble extract rar files. I'm using the latest version 2.3 and when I try to extract a multipart rar archive I get the following message:

"The contents of the file <filename> can not be extracted with this program."

This is very odd, as I've not really had any problems with rar files before. I have about 100+ rar files that I cannot extract with The Unarchiver :(

If you want me to send you some of the files I can, but it's about 100-200MB.

Thanks

>>749

Are they named .000, .001?

>>750

No. .part01.rar, .part02.rar etc

Something is definitely broken in 2.3 with regards to .rar extraction. I downloaded the latest version 3.92 of rar from RARLAB and extracted all 100+ files without any issues.

I hope that this will be resolved in the next version.

>>752

Can't do anything without example files that fail.

>>753

I told you I can give you a few of the files, but they're large 130MB for two part rar files, i.e. part1 and part2. Tell me how to give them to you and I will.

Also, doesn't The Unarchiver use the rar and unrar command line tools from RARLAB? If so then I don't see why it doesn't work.

Let me know how to give you the two files.

>>754

You can try uploading them to some file hosting service and mailing me the URLs, I suppose.

Also, The Unarchiver uses no external tools.

Hey,
is there a possible way, to create an exit, cancel or break up button?
Sometimes, a zip-file will not really unzip, and than the unarchiver hangs! than I have to complete restart my mac, to stop the program!
Would be really nice for this button, because I also cannot close it from everywhere, not in the finder nor in the dock!
Thanks :-)

>>756

I'd rather have a copy of any file that does that so I can fix the bug that makes it do that. That really isn't supposed to be possible at all.

Really nice thing. Would love to seem some update mechanism implemented. Unarchiver seems to be ideal solution for mac and I don't want to mix next version when it occurs. Maybe implementing sparkle, as update framework?

A little usability thing with v2.3.
I have "After successfully extracting an archive, Move the archive to the trash" option ON.

When an archive then fails to extract, the error message is displayd and two buttons are present: Stop and Continue.

Clicking 'Stop' closes the program without deleting the archive, but pressing 'Continue' DOES move the archive to the Trash, although the extraction was unsuccessfull!

Is there a way to extract a password protected file with the Unarchiver?

When I try to open the file (in my case a sitx file), goes into the extract mode but in a split second exits, without giving me an option to enter the password before extraction.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Many thanks.

I'd like to offer yet another vote for Sparkle auto-update support.

Also, I found a dmg that The Unarchiver (2.2 or 2.3, I can't check right now) claimed was corrupt. It's the Carbonite backup installer. Apple's archive utility happily extracted and ran it without error. Is this something you've heard of before? I'll post the archive somewhere if needed.

If I had to bet, I'm guessing it's like Palm's HotSync protocol, where the open source implementation sometimes doesn't work properly because it lacks the bugs of the official software. ;)

Also, WAHa, for the record, you rock.

I would like to provide the Greek localization!
I already know how to localize an application for Mac OS X.
Thank you for this useful application,
George.

hi WAHa.

just for the record, i can't extract these files with the unarchiver but with path finder's built-in stuffit engine, they decrunch fine.

check the files on post 42 to 46 on the following link:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/subdownloader/+bug/245836

cheers.

>>765

Put in a quick fix for that. However, you'll need to click the .z01 part and not the .zip part for it to work.

ok thanks.

All right, time for another release. 2.4 is now out:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/TheUnarchiver2.4.zip

• 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.

Now, as a side project, ever since version 2.0 I've been working on making the XADMaster library more platform-independent so that it can be used on other OSes. Now, finally, with version 2.4, I also started working on a command-line utility to decompress archives, that is meant to be a cross-platform tool. It is very definitely not anywhere near done yet, but it works, sort of!

You can get a binary compiled for Mac OS X here: http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar0.1.zip

It currently takes no arguments, and can't handle passwords, and the character encoding detection might get confused, but at least it can extract archives.

Thanks to help from halcy, it can also be compiled on Linux. There is a Makefile.linux that should build it and some test programs on Linux. It requires zlib, libbz2, libcrypto (from OpenSSL), and GNUstep. It might work with other Objective-C runtimes, but that has not been tested. You are on your own if you want to try that.

I've only tried building it on Ubuntu myself, but I've found that that works very well as long as you install the requirements. If you haven't yet, install them as follows:

sudo apt-get install build-essentials
sudo apt-get install libz-dev
sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnustep-base-dev

I think that's all of them. If I am wrong, tell me. Then, build everything in the XADMaster directory:

make -f Makefile.linux

It should theoretically be possible to get it to build on Windows, and I'm going to be setting up a cross-compilation for that later, hopefully. If you get it to build on anything else, tell me!

And obviously, don't rely on any of this actually working, or on the specifics of how it works! It'll all change soon enough!

When prompting for a password, the name of the file needing the password isn't shown anywhere. If you'd queued up a bunch of files to decompress and one somewhere in the middle needs a password, this is sort of annoying.

I took a couple minutes and tweaked the PasswordView nib to have a line above that shows the same data as the top line in ProgressView so that the filename is visible, but I don't really love the layout. I've attached a screenshot.

I'd love it if this issue were confronted in this or some other way in a future version.

>>770

Good point, that should probably be fixed one way or the other.

(Also, if you file it as an issue on http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/issues/list I will be less likely to forget about it.)

Thanks for the discdoubler work.

Any chance of being able to drop a non-DD folder or CD full of DD files in non-DD folders and getting theunarchiver to extract them all?

As it is, if you drop a non-compressed folder on theunarchiver, it doesn't look inside.

Thanks again.

>>771

Filed as issue 262. Thanks! It's one of the very few things about The Unarchiver that I don't love.

Would be nice to have information about current version and update mechanism, maybe implemented through Sparkle? It's really handy mechanism. If not that I checked iusethis website I wouldn't find out that new version came out recently :(

>>774
This is why its useful to use an application like Appfresh (it checks iusethis pages for installed apps).

I'm new to The Unarchiver. It's very quick and very efficient. However, I noticed when you have to type in a password, you don't see what you type in. It comes out as those security dots. It would be nice if you can see the password you are typing in. That way you can be sure you are typing in the right word.
I hope you can introduce this feature in the next update.
Thanks.

I'm new to MacOS (coming from Linux and Windows) and The Unarchiver was recommended as the solution to all my uncompression needs -- and it's great!

The thing that it doesn't do, that I really need, is offer an interface so I can look into a file and pull out specific things, instead of having to explode an entire archive.

I tried searching through this thread to see if that had ever been suggested, but couldn't find anything. Don't know if that's so far outside of the intent to make it like the BOMArchiverHelper.app that it wouldn't be considered.

There's a filed issue (No.109) for adding a way to look at a file, but that's not really the same thing as being able to extract specific files. (At least I don't think it is.) So far the only app that I've seen on the Mac that offers this functionality is BetterZip, which I guess is fine, but if one app could do everything, that would certainly be preferable...

>>777

Yes, that would be an entirely different app, that I am not really interested in making.

(I've been toying with the idea of making a FUSE client, though, which could serve the same purpose, but haven't bothered doing any actual work on that so far.)

Pity

I'm wondering if anyone else had this, but when I downloaded and use The Unarchiver on a .rar file, everything worked fine, the file (.avi format) even opened properly, but there was one problem: the video played with the sound, but no picture. Anyone have any ideas as to what's wrong and how I could fix it?

>>780
it sounds like you don't have whatever video codec you need for the file, which is completely unrelated to the unarchiver.

Try expanding an iCab archive. The browser iCab creates ZIP archives. So if you rename such an archive to .zip it is possible to expand it and see the content. The Unarchiver unfortunately stops with an error: Could not write to the destination directory. This happens when the archive is located in the Desktop folder on 10.5.

>>786

Without the actual files, I can do nothing about it.

(It also seems to have problems submitting posts!)

hey WAHa, me again.
you know the more formats the better even if it means more hard work for you, right? =) kidding of course, your work is most appreciated and i recommend it to everyone i know.
do you think is it worth to support the 'pkg' and 'mpkg' format for those pesky mac packages which go through a bunch of dialogs and ask you for the admin password just to move an app to the app folder?

this guy in the link below, released "unpkg" which does that. it's a python script (source included inside the app>contents>resources as seen in the readme), so it must be a pretty easy task, no? not sure how easy i it to call a python script, really.

best to you, man.

http://www.timdoug.com/unpkg/

>> 790

どうも

>> 1

Thank you so much for this App. You're the man.

i don't know what 790 said but that girl was unzipped successfully.

>>789
regarding my own post, i emailed the author to ask if he could update it to unpack mpkg as well (currently if there's more than 1 pkg inside an mpkg, it only unpacks the first one), so if you consider getting it into the unarchiver, i'll let you know when the author updates it.

best.

>>793

If I recall correctly, .pkg files are just bundles that contain .pax archives. The Unarchiver should open those if you just right-click the .pkg first and select "Show Bundle Contents", and locate the actual archive inside it.

yeah it's actually an archive.pax.gz. problem is i have to do 3 steps, copy it out of the bundle, unpack once to get archive.pax and twice to get the folder. by the way, i always get errors unpacking pax files with the unarchiver (can't extract the file x, stop or continue, but pressing continue actually gets the unpacking done, if i check apply to all).
apart from the pesky error message, i was just hoping for a way of unpacking in 1 go.

>>795

If you have any files like that handy, please post them on the bug tracker.

i need help! i tried opening an .exe an i got this error message...
does anybody know how to help?

>>797

There are a lot of different formats data might be stored in an .exe file. The Unarchiver apparently doesn't support this particular one. Post an bug on the bug tracker, including the file, and I'll have a look at how hard it would be to add support.

It would be nice if after extraction, not only the archive could be deleted, but also corresponding .part-files which are still on the disc from resumed downloads.

I'm missing an option that would be very usefull: The Unarchiver should ignore the Thumbs_db-files from Windows and not extract them. That would be great.

hello thank you for the software, its great.
it would be cool if you added an option in the preferences to make unarchiver visible in the application switcher and the dock. now i have to modify the info.plist file to make it visible. if i have a lot of windows unarchiver disappears in the background while unraring and only way to find it, to check time status or to find out if progress is finished, is to use expose all windows which im not a big user of since i have tons of windows open all the time.
thanks

A new release, with mostly bugfixes again:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/TheUnarchiver2.5.zip

• 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 that made unpacking on NTFS drives generate errors.
• Fixes for Tar and RPM files.

I have also been doing more work on being cross-platform. The experimental command-line unar tool from earlier is now much improved. It actually takes some arguments now, for one. There is also a new too, lsar, for listing the contents of archives.

Both are still far from feature-complete. Most obviously, unar has no way to automatically contain unpacked files in a directory like The Unarchiver does, and it also overwrites files without asking, so be careful with that. lsar also does not show very much information about the files it lists, either.

Precompiled binaries for OS X and Windows are avaiable:

http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar0.2.zip
http://theunarchiver.googlecode.com/files/unar0.2_win.zip

The Windows version requires a couple DLLs which are included. I hope to cut down on those later on.

For Linux, you will need to build it yourself. I have only tested this on Ubuntu so far. For a stock Ubuntu system, what you need to do after downloading and unpacking the source is:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libz-dev
sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnustep-base-dev
sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
cd XADMaster
make -f Makefile.linux

This should give you the unar and lsar executable, along with some test programs.

I'd really appreciate it if people could take the time to test these tools on various systems, and report any problems or requests!

Previous versions of "The Unarchiver" did not use a hidden temporary directory for extracting contents of archives. Somewhere in the 2.x versions the app started to use hidden temp directories. Could this be turned into a user preference? I mean an option not to use temp dirs? I liked the old behaviour, because if I started extraction of an archive that contained only a single large file (eg. a movie :-) ), I could move the file (that is being extracted) around while the extraction was in progress. Now I've to either use commandline or enable showing of hidden files to do that. Or wait til the extraction completes.

Hi,
First off I would like to say thank you for an App that has been reliable every time I've used it. So Thank You!.
I use The Unarchiver on my home iMac, and I use Portableapps.com http://portableapps.com/ when I am on a Windows Unit.
I would like to ask if you would be able to build your unar.exe to sit in the taskbar of windows and if the user was to double click a .zip file it would extract that .zip file to a user defined, layout?.
just as The Unarchiver works on my iMac at home.

To get a very crude version of what I mean..
I used this http://portableapps.com/node/22677 to associate .zip etc to unar.exe and it worked kind of. I had no control over where the file was un-zipped to.

thanks
Ray

Will you be adding lzip (.lz) to The Unarchiver?
<http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html>
-Bill

>>807

If anybody starts using it, sure. But it seems sort of redundant when there's xz. It would be nice if people would settle on something less overengineered than xz though.

Is there any advantage to lz over 7z ?
lz files seem slightly smaller than 7z, but not much.
-Bill

>>809
One advantage to 7z over lz and xz
7z will compress directories.
-Bill

hi :( i dont understand at all how to use it
i have a rar file game thingy and i want to play it but it keeps asking me what program i want to open it with so the game cant be played :( and i have tons of files like those that i cannot open :(

test

>>811
This may very well be my favorite support question I've seen.

Waha, so when you going to add support for games? I'm imagining a tetris clone built into the progress window.

http://cwcheat.consoleworld.org/CWCHEAT_0_2_2_REVD.RAR
Here's a file that doesn't unarchive right.

>>814

Confirmed.

So I downloaded a 700MB .rar file from megaupload onto my mac and when I finish downloading and open it with the Unarchiver it says it cannot be completed because

"Could not extract the file file/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_02.VOB the archive file is incomplete"

I've downloaded the file multiple times already and I get the same result every time. Can someone help me?