Nowadays, we have a plethora of free arhivers (7-zip, j-zip, winrar <-- okey, that one's not free, ...)

But does anyone know of some free command line archivers for popular formats (RAR, ZIP or its unix variants) for Windows platform.

link|improve this question

62% accept rate
As Phoshi pointed out, 7-zip has a great command-line interface. It really is becoming (has become?) the de facto standard in archiving tools. Plus, a small part of me was so happy to notice the absence of WinZip in your list of examples. ;) – JMD Oct 20 '09 at 15:00
I'll admit I prefer WinRAR for the GUI, but I do most of my stuff at the command line anyway, so 7z is invaluable. – Phoshi Oct 20 '09 at 15:02
feedback

4 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

You said it! 7zip has a lovely CLI interface.

p:\ath\to\7z.exe a hello.rar *.txt

would archive all your text files in your current directory,

p:\ath\to\7z.exe e hello.rar

would recreate them.

link|improve this answer
better yet, drop it in your %systemroot% directory and do away with the ugly `p:\ath\to` stuff. :) – quack quixote Oct 20 '09 at 17:23
That's very true - I have a fairly hacked together solution using python and doskey simply to avoid that stuff, but it's pretty damn good for one or twi things LD – Phoshi Oct 20 '09 at 17:53
Incredible. I've been using it forever, and never knew (nor bothered to check) whether it had a command line interface. Made my day, thanks ! – ldigas Oct 20 '09 at 17:57
It's not even a half-hearted interface, it's actually really bloody good! :) – Phoshi Oct 20 '09 at 17:58
feedback

GZIP for windows will definitely handle zipping / unzipping your "unix variants" on windows.

link|improve this answer
1  
gzip in itself is not an arhiver (just compressor), need tar (or similar) as well for any archiving. But gzip is not the only way to compress a tar archive either so gzip is hardly enough. – Joakim Elofsson Oct 20 '09 at 16:04
True. i got the impression from the wording of the question that perhaps @ldigas, was looking more for how to uncompress files in a 'unix format', but I think I read it too narrowly. – DaveParillo Oct 20 '09 at 16:09
feedback

winrar is very good (and it's free). Available on Windows and Linux and Mac

link|improve this answer
2  
Where did you see it was free ? – ldigas Oct 20 '09 at 18:00
The website has it as "trial". But you can use it as long as you don't mind clicking on "keep using" from time to time. You don't have to pay for it. – Zepplock Jan 1 '10 at 19:02
feedback

Info-Zip is great for zipping and unzipping zip-archives.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.