The Unarchiver is an

ad-supported Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...

data decompression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

utility, which supports more formats than Archive Utility (formerly known as BOMArchiveHelper), the built-in archive unpacker program in

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. It can also handle filenames in various

character encodings Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical values that make up a c ...

, created using

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

versions that use those character encodings. The latest version requires Mac OS X Lion or higher. The Unarchiver does not compress files. Prior to the purchase by MacPaw in 2017, The Unarchiver was

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

licensed under the

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, up to version 3.11.1 (released 2016). This version, and the versions prior to the buyout, are still available for download from Dag Ågren’s original website. The Unarchiver version 3.11.1 provided a free-software implementation of extraction of RAR versions up to RAR5. The corresponding command line utilities unar and lsar are

licensed under the

run on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, and macOS. A key feature of The Unarchiver is its ability to handle many old or obscure archive formats, including

StuffIt StuffIt is a discontinued family of computer software utilities for archiving and compressing files. Originally produced for Macintosh, versions for Microsoft Windows, Linux (x86), and Sun Solaris were later created. The proprietary compression ...

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

disk images, and LZH/LZX archives. The source code credits libxad, an Amiga file format library. Ågren also reverse engineered the StuffIt and StuffIt X formats. His work resulted in one of the most complete open source implementations of these proprietary formats.

References

External links

The Unarchiver's Website

unar, lsar source code repository

Pre-buyout free software releases (source code and binaries)

Code repository for the free software version
File archivers Data compression software macOS software Formerly open-source or free software {{mac-software-stub