Looking for archiver

[m^(2)]

Recently I found a great compression library, QuickLZ. As the name suggests, it's fast...actually faster than copying. However, their archiver is too simple for any real use, it can only compress and decompress files, I'd need at least listing contents too. I contacted it's developer and he is not willing to improve it and suggested writing to another archiver developer and convince them to add support for QuickLZ or take an open source one and do it myself. Obviously, I prefer the first option, but none of authors I wrote to even replied...so I'm looking for a simple C or C++ archiver that I could modify...or any archiver with more communicative author and command line interface (so I can make a Total Commander plugin ) .
Any suggestions?

[ashghost]

I bet you already contacted the PeaZip developer. If you didn't, AFAIK it supports more compression formats than any other GUI and is pretty concerned about helping users know which formats are fastest and most efficient, etc. It's written in FreePascal, and I have no idea if that works for you, but there is a CLI.

The developer seems responsive to suggestions in the SourceForge forum, as he replied in the following thread after just 12 hours this week:

https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php ... _id=619280

[m^(2)]

Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't try PeaZip.
- I didn't know that it has CLI
- It crashes on my computer. I reported it before on PortableApps.com (it was their version), but they just ignored the problem.
It crashes with official versions too, so now I submitted it to the PeaZip bug tracker and if the author fixes this, I'll ask to add QuickLZ or something alike.

BTW PeaZip doesn't even come close to Total Commander when it comes to number of supported formats. It has plugins for practically everything and even if it doesn't, it's usually easy to make it use a command line program.

[freakazoid]

interesting compressor!

how does it stack up to the standard RAR or 7zip in terms of compression?

[SeanJohnShaffer]

[Giorgio Tani]

Hi, QuickLZ seem an interesting project, and it is GPLed which is very good; btw, do you know if they have/plan a port to Linux? I haven't found after a quick read of their site.

PeaZip supports QUAD and BALZ, which are very efficient and quite fast (good speed in compression, very fast on decompression) ROLZ based algorithms developed by Ilia Muraviev.
They have not exactly the same speed/compression tradeoff target of QuickLZ, but I think they can be interesting if you are searching for a fast and efficient LZ based compressor.

However, alongside the file extension directly supported PeaZip allow to use custom executables for archive creation and extraction, with no plugin required (any executable allowing command line interaction can be used by PeaZip in that way), customizing parameters and syntax, and using PeaZip frontend for input/output selection (see documentation).
I originally added that feature for PAQ/LPAQ project, where updates and forks from contributors are very frequent and PeaZip may help testers without the need to wait until direct support or the development of a plugin, but this can be helpful for other executables too.

[m^(2)]

Now I took a deeper look into QuickLZ comand line and it's not enough.
I need it to list archive contents in any text form, to the console, to a text file, anything but GUI. Another thing to request = less likely to succeed.
BTW the author replied to my bug report already, pretty quick.

ADDED:

interesting compressor!

how does it stack up to the standard RAR or 7zip in terms of compression?

www.maximumcompression.com
Take a look into compressors supported by PeaZip, it doesn't have own algorithm, so it doesn't have own entry.

[Giorgio Tani]

Take a look into compressors supported by PeaZip, it doesn't have own algorithm, so it doesn't have own entry.

PeaZip has its own format, .pea, but it is mainly targeted to encryption, authentication and integrity check rather to maximum compression ratio.

pea format has its own compression scheme, based on deflate, which is discussed in pea_help.pdf on project website, and is benchmarked on Matt Mahoney's large text compression benchmark page: http://www.cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compres ... .html#3244

Other formats supported by PeaZip, more interesting from the compression ratio / compression speed point of view, are benchmarked and compared with WinZip and WinRAR:
http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-co ... hmark.html
There is also a benchmark comparing the speed of previously tested algorithms on a single and dual core machine:
http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-co ... hmark.html

[m^(2)]

Take a look into compressors supported by PeaZip, it doesn't have own algorithm, so it doesn't have own entry.

PeaZip has its own format, .pea, but it is mainly targeted to encryption, authentication and integrity check rather to maximum compression ratio.

pea format has its own compression scheme, based on deflate, which is discussed in pea_help.pdf on project website, and is benchmarked on Matt Mahoney's large text compression benchmark page: http://www.cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compres ... .html#3244

Other formats supported by PeaZip, more interesting from the compression ratio / compression speed point of view, are benchmarked and compared with WinZip and WinRAR:
http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-co ... hmark.html
There is also a benchmark comparing the speed of previously tested algorithms on a single and dual core machine:
http://peazip.sourceforge.net/peazip-co ... hmark.html

Sorry, my bad, it indeed uses a modified Deflate.
However, archive format is something totally different. It barely affects performance, only supported features and alone it really wouldn't make PeaZip worth benchmarking (unless the format requires checksums, which would make it slightly slower ).