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!

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?

>>816
Stop pirating, and buy your movies.

>>816

Without the file there is nothing I can do.

Also, there is no error message like that in The Unarchiver, are you just typing it from memory, or is there some other confusion?

Hi,

isn't there a way to tell the Program to check for missing archive files BEFORE unpacking the whole archive and then telling me it could not complete AFTER the whole process lasted for 30 mins.

It should be quite easy to get a directory listing, find out about the filename of the first file and the find out about the last file in that sequence. The files in between the first an the last have to be there in sequence. If one is missing, the unarchiving will fail, no matter what.

This algorithm would not work, if the last file in that directory is not actually the last file needed. But one could check if all other files are the same size and only the last file is smaller (even if it's only one byte).

So there is quite a bit of room to improve those "unable to extract" messages.

Furthermore it would be helpful to show which files are missing. UnRarX tells this quite easily.

Anyway - this is a really fine and fast programmed unarchiver. Keep going on :-)

Thanks a lot and best regards. Jason.

Hiya, great piece of software, It's one of the first things I install on any new mac, or after I update/reinstall Mac OS X. So i just want to say a big thankyou for that.

There is one tiny thing I would love to see added (or at least it seems small, but I'm not a programmer) would it be possible to add something like SParkle integration to update to the latest versions automatically? (http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/) I'd understand if this is not a priority, but it's the only thing I can see that would be needed to make this software perfect :D

THanks once again for the great bit of software.

I'm attempting to use the CLI 'unar' to extract a .sitx file. It seems to hang on a few files (so far, 45 MB TIFFs). It appears to extract the file properly, but I have to hit Ctrl+C to have it continue.

Any help would be appreciated.

>>823

Without the files, there is not much I can do about it.

>>824

Would you like me to send them to you? If so, how?

Thanks,
Kyle

It's great app about all of archivers. kkk

But....

when I use this app, windows makes minimum and then it is in the dock.

it finishes.... windows don't deappears..... I think that is bug....

sorry had wrong image in last post

previous image is related to this post sorry for the confusion never used this board before..

i am trying to modify the source for myself and can not get it to compile no matter what i seem to do is there a secret to it or what? its the same errors with not finding frameworks.

just asking for a bit of info on it. hope you can help. using xcode 3.2.3 10.6.4 have the 10.4 and up SDK installed thanks.
Justin

>>825

Mail them to me, or upload them on some upload site and mail me the links.

>>829

No idea what's going on there, seems completely broken on your side. Make sure to use a new enough Xcode to start with, and there shouldn't be any gcc 4.0 used.

Hi,

I would like to ask you to implement a new feature in the next release:
I imagine this as an option in the preferences window- extraction tab like

Create new folder for the extracted file

- Only if there is more than one top-level item
- Always
- Never - this would be the new option..

Thanks in advance

Hi,

I would like to ask you to implement a new feature in the next release:
I imagine this as an option in the preferences window- extraction tab like

Create new folder for the extracted file

- Only if there is more than one top-level item
- Always
- Never - this would be the new option..

Thanks in advance

>>833

No. This would require lots of additions to handle file collisions, and that is more work than the feature is worth to me.

Hi,

extracting large zip archives (around 8 GB) results in target folders around 4,4 GB and probably in a crash of the application due to buffer overrun.

Which version? Also, to fix it I'd need the archive in question.

"output data buffers border exceeded"

I get this message when I try to unarchive RAR files over 4.0 gig.

I click continue and get a movie that is missing the last half hour or so. i am using version 2.5.

Any solution to this?

Thanks. Great program by the way.

> Any solution to this?

Not unless you can give me the file so I can reproduce the problem.

Hi

I would love the see passwordlist-support in the next version.

Thanks ;-)

Hi!

I just wanted to say thank you for your truly awesome work on the XADMaster framework. I've been implementing it into my little peace of software, TranspRAR. I'm not sure I use all the pieces as intended, but the framework does an amazing job streaming random accessed, uncompressed data from every possible archive.

Again, thank you for your hard work and for making it all available to the world.

http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php?/topic/17211-transprar-rar-workaround-for-plex-9/
http://github.com/alleus/TranspRAR

Hi,

First of all, thanks for the awesome app. Just wanted to ask if you plan to add "keep broken files" feature anytime soon?

>>841

Keep how?

Hi there,

is there any possibility to preview an archive? Often I don't want to extract the whole archive - it would be nice to look inside and only select some files for extracting. Why there isn't such a tool with simple file browser (like in 7-Zip) for Mac OS?

Best regards!

Hi,

Thanks for developing this program. I would like to use sources for The Unarchiver in a larger project, the larger project being a GPL-2+ project. Thus, I'm interested in helping develop a library out of The Unarchiver. First though, I need some clarification.

For every file that doesn't include a copyright header, are those files under LGPL? Is the LGPL version used LGPL-2.1 or later (please say yes)? Is there a list of authors somewhere?

Thanks in advance :)

>>845

Well, usually I don't care much about licensing my code and consider anything I've written myself to be public domain or BSD or whatever the most premissive license that works where you live is. However, parts of The Unarchiver are based on libxad, which is LGPL 2.1 (and, apparently, "or later") and I haven't kept close track of which files could be considered entirely my own and which are derivative of libxad code, so the safest is to just assume everything is LGPL.

The Unarchiver already is built around a core library, though, so there's not much work to be done there. It should be entirely possible to use it in another project. Documentation is sorely lacking, though. There is a short overview on the wiki and that is all. Hopefully it is self-descriptive enough that it shouldn't be too hard to use.

>>846

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I've done some work with theunarchiver, mainly to clarify the licensing. I've also added some C bindings that can be used to work with theunarchiver in a C project.

All this work is in the "mcitadel-theunarchiver" clone in googlecode. Note that I removed the official unrar sources in this clone, so you'll have to cherry pick commits if you want some of my changes.

Is there anyone doing a C port of the unarchiver? The project I'm using this for is XBMC. I would be interested in a C port, particularly to remove the need for GNUstep or some other objective c framework. I would be glad to help out with a c port. XBMC is already huge as it is as far as the amount of libraries it uses plus code written for it.

>>847

I've been thinking about it, since it would be nice to be more portable, but it would be an annoying lot of work. A lot depends on things provided by the class libraries, and if that is all re-written, it would have to be wrapped back up to provide the old Objective-C API.

My question seems to be no feature in the future!? :-/

>>849

It would be a lot of work for something I don't personally use. I'd rather have a simple and streamlined program. There are other apps that can show archive contents. so it's not really a priority.

>>848

Apparently there's already a library written in C that has similar functionality as The Unarchiver.
http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/

RAR support is still not implemented though.
http://code.google.com/p/libarchive/issues/detail?id=40

Would you mind if I ported the relevant RAR code from The Unarchiver for use in libarchive? If so, would you mind if I relicensed the ported code under BSD? libarchive is under BSD license.

>>851

Any code that I wrote from scratch I'm happy to re-license under BSD. That would include the RAR code, but I have to warn you: It might be a lot more work than you think. RAR is a real mess of a file format, and the implementation in The Unarchiver may not be easy to follow, no matter how hard I've tried to make it such. However, having a portable and open implementation of RAR would be a very good thing, so I think it is worth a shot.

(Also, it has at least one known bug that I need to get around to fixing.)

>>852

Thanks :)

The Unarchiver fails to extract all files from a .rar archive (see attached file), yet Zipeg is able to successfully extract all files. FYI.

>>854

Seems to work for me, but I already fixed some RAR bugs so that's probably why. Try it with 2.6 when it gets released (should be pretty soon).

Well, 2.6 is done. This one focuses on adding support for more old formats, and bugfixes.

• Added support for Now Compress and LBR.
• Improved DiskDoubler support. Almost all modes are now supported, including hardware-accelerated ones.
• Better support for ARC, including proprietary PAK algorithms.
• Better support for Squeeze and Zoo.
• Several bugfixes for RAR, Zip and Compress files.
• Fixed broken handling of multi-part files in unar.exe on Windows.

unar and lsar have also been updated to 0.3, with the same changes. Otherwise they remain as before.

Is there any way to extract files and overwrite files of the same name rather than appending '-1' to them?

Ever thought of making a Cocoa framework and releasing it under a BSD license? It'd be a huge benefit to the Mac developer community!

>>858

http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/source/browse/#hg/XADMaster

Speaking of frameworks, I was just scratching my head wondering why The Unarchiver breaks my symbolic links, but doesn't break frameworks in app bundles (which contain symbolic links). Turns out it only breaks absolute symlinks.

I'd submit a bug report if the "Bug tracker" link worked, but it craps out (http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/).

To clarify, try this at home:

• create a folder named fonk, inside of which you put 3 files:
• a file named zonk.txt
• a symbolic link to zonk.txt with absolute path (path-to-fonk/zonk.txt)
• a symbolic link to zonk.txt with relative path (../fonk/zonk.txt)
• zip fonk (I used the Finder in Mac OS X 10.6.5)
• extract it using BOMArchiverHelper.app: both links still work (the absolute one points to the original, the relative one points to wherever you extracted it as long as the folder name stays fonk)
• extract it using The Unarchiver 2.6: the relative link works, the absolute one doesn't

Could I make two suggestions that I'd love to see?
One is a way to tell which version I have installed, and the other is creating some kind of profiles in the extraction tab. I ALMOST ALWAYS want to purge the archive, but sometimes don't, and configured the app to send to trash. But when I don't, I have to go to trash, Put Back doesn't show up, and I have to manually drag to the original location,,, If I could configure the default actions, AND the actions with a modifier, it would be great... eg. Just double click sends to trash, holding COMMAND the archive remains, holding OPTION send content to Desktop and purge archive, etc.
Thanks, I've donated, awesome app.

The rar file from http://legroom.net/scripts/download.php?file=uniextract161_noinst doesn't work in the Unarchiver but does with the command line unrar. I believe this is a bug with the Unarchiver.

Hi Everyone,

I get ZIP files that are created with Winzip on a German version of Windows Vista.

The Unarchiver 2.6 thinks the encoding is Windows Latin 1, and garbles the ä in the name of the zipped document. I have to change the encoding to Dos Latin 1 in order to have the document name extracted correctly

Can this be fixed?

Thanks,

Hans

>>865

Does the Mac builtin tool ( BOMArchiveHelper ) unzip correctly?

To test, disable Unarchiver for zip files, ie un-check "Zip Archive".

>>864

I can't reproduce this. What version are you using?

>>865

Probably not. Guessing encodings is not an exact science. If there are not many special characters to work with, it's mostly impossible to get it right.

I had problems unarchiving a vast collection of 114 sequential .zips (the final .app is +11GB...) so I resurrected The Unarchiver from the Trash to see if it might help. It didn't but it reminded me why I had trashed it in the first place: it is unable to handle such large files. It has been running for thelast 2+ hours, saying 'Preparing to extract <filename>'. A search for a part of <filename> via Easy Search' - set to find all files and folders, to ignore case and to search invisible etc. locations - finds nothing new to indicate that it is even writing anything to a file anywhere. Stuffit Expander took a fair while (many minutes) but completed, if not successfully.

Any suggestions why it should not go back into Trash?