AtariWiki V3: Pack and unpack in 7z format with a Mac

Pack and unpack in 7z format with a Mac#

First open the Terminal app and type in:

brew install p7zip

The program itself is called: '7z'

In Terminal you can type in:

man 7z

for further information. Please see below for a copy of the info, too.

For a smart handling, please type in:

cd <path of the folder, you want to work with>

for example:

cd folder

Even more smart is to just type in 'cd ' (please don't forget the blank after the letter d and then just drag & drop the folder with the archive inside to the actual cursor position! That saves you a lot of typing! :-)

Example for packing#

For packing a file or an archive, please type in:

7z a file.7z <path of the file>

file.7z is the name of the archive which will be created in 7z format with the suffix 7z.

<path of the file> must be the path on your Mac leading to the file and the file itself at the end, of course. The same is true when dealing with a folder.

Example for unpacking#

For unpacking a file or an archive, please type in:

7z x <path of the archive.7z>

The program will then unpack the file 'archive.7z' in the same folder.

Credits#

- Tomasz 'Kr0tki' Krasuski for telling us about the best packer available - Carsten Strotmann for sharing the knowledge on how to do it on a Mac as smart as possible

References#

Infos from the Terminal app#

NAME 7z - A file archiver with highest compression ratio

SYNOPSIS 7z adeltux - SWITCH <ARCHIVE_NAME> <ARGUMENTS>...

DESCRIPTION 7-Zip is a file archiver with the highest compression ratio. The program supports 7z (that implements LZMA com- pression algorithm), ZIP, CAB, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats. Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format.

7z uses plugins to handle archives.

FUNCTION LETTERS a Add

d Delete

e Extract

l List

t Test

u Update

x eXtract with full paths

SWITCHES -ai[r[-]]{@listfile|!wildcard} Include archives

-ax[r[-]]{@listfile|!wildcard} :