Zip ‘em up
OK, a new category and idea, just thought of very recently, I thought that on the occasions I find some nice software that actually seems to work as it should do, and provide a nice little solution to a job, I’d post about it and let people know.
First up is a file compression tool. Everyone uses Winzip, mostly illegally I’d imagine, anyone ever bought a copy of it? It’s not actually free ya know. Winrar is a fairly well known alternative that actually is free, I’ve never personally liked it much though, I think it was the icon….
Recently, I had need for a free file compression tool that could also handle command line instructions so I could write batch files for it. Winzip has a free command line add-on, but requires you to buy Winzip. We don’t use Winzip, and as I said, I was after something, my bosses weren’t going to buy some Winzip licenses just for that.
Bit of a search on Source Forge and Cnet Download produced the same programme. A free application that can zip things up, extract them, do it better than Winzip does, and run command line instructions as well.
It’s called 7-Zip, seems pretty easy to use, and compresses things to a higher degree than Winzip.
I tested both against a 276kb Word doc with just text and table in, no images, Winzip got it down to 65kb. 7-Zip beat it by around 4% to 56kb. Not bad. I’ve found cases where it’s even better. My intial requirement was to compress some MySQL tables for sending over the Internet, I can’t remember exactly, but I think Winzip managed to compress them down to about 1.4MB, while 7-Zip managed to get it down to about 850kb.
Adding files to an archive is as easy as with Winzip, right click the file/s and click “Add to archive…”. Choose your options, such as the format and compression level, and away you go.
The one thing that is a bit silly, it doesn’t register itself with its own .7z files when it installs. So you can’t just double click on an archive to extract it without setting up the file associations yourself. You can, however, right click the archive, and click “Extract Here” or “Extract Files…” to choose to extract them somewhere else.
You can load the actual programme and do it if you want, but who wants to do that when you have right click context menu’s to use?
Oh yeah, and I mentioned the quite funky command line operations. Quite useful if you have the need for it, useless if you don’t I guess. For my needs, it’s a star though, allows me to run the same compression routine from one batch file, and another batch file to enable the other people to unzip it to the right place without having to do anything or even worry about how to use it instead of Winzip.
So, 7-Zip gets a big thumbs up from me, in a techy, network admin kind of way. I’m thinking it’s going to replace Winzip/WinRar everywhere I go now.
Three Cheers for open source 