Data Compression Tools Collection

This is a Linux port of SEA arc for MS-DOS. It creates, modifies, and extracts from .arc files using the old Crunch, Squash, and Squeeze compression methods.

Untested under OSX [more]

bzip2 is a portable, lossless data compressor based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform. It achieves good compression and runs on practically every (32/64-bit) platform in the known universe. The compression engine is also available as a library (libbz2), should you desire a programmatic interface. [more]

cabextract will extract the contents of Microsoft cabinet archives. It also supports cabinets embedded in executables and multi-part cabinets. It fully supports all cabinet compression methods, including MSZIP, Quantum, and LZX decompression. [more]

gzip (GNU zip) is a compression utility designed to be a replacement for 'compress'. Its main advantages over compress are much better compression and freedom from patented algorithms. The GNU Project uses it as the standard compression program for its system. [more]

LHa for UNIX is a console-based utility that uncompresses and compresses .lha packages.

Untested under OSX [more]

LZO is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C. It offers pretty fast compression and very fast decompression. Decompression requires no memory. In addition there are slower compression levels achieving a quite competitive compression ratio while still decompressing at this very high speed. [more]

pkcrack is an implementation of a known-plaintext-attack on ZIP file encryption. It can help you recover files after you've lost or forgotten the password. The attack is a known plaintext attack, which means you have to know part of the encrypted data in order to break the cipher.

Yes I know this is not really a compression tool, but still its better here that in any other collection. OOPS almost forgot, this is totally untested under OSX, although it did compile, I just have not had a chance to test it. Anyone who has done any testing please let me know how it went. [more]

RAR is a general purpose archiving and compression program competing with/replacing programs such as PKZip, ARJ and others. RAR offers significantly improved compression ratios, easier use and a better price as well as supporting long file names, disk spanning and self-extracting file creation. RAR introduces an original compression algorithm. It allows higher compression ratios than other PC archiving tools, especially on executable files, Object libraries, large text files, etc

rar is available for just about every platform known to man, including OSX, Linux, BSD and even that windoze thing. [more]

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, etc [more]

GNU shar makes so-called shell archives out of many files, preparing them for transmission by electronic mail services. A shell archive is a collection of files that can be unpacked by /bin/sh. A wide range of features provide extensive flexibility in manufacturing shars and in specifying shar smartness. For example, shar may compress files, uuencode binary files, split long files and construct multi-part mailings, ensure correct unsharing order, and provide simplistic checksums. GNU unshar scans a set of mail messages looking for the start of shell archives. It will automatically strip off the mail headers and other introductory text. The archive bodies are then unpacked by a copy of the shell. unshar may also process files containing concatenated shell archives. [more]

GNU tar saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive. It includes multivolume support, the ability to archive sparse files, automatic archive compression/decompression, remote archives and special features that allow tar to be used for incremental and full backups. [more]

unace is a utility to extract, view, and test the contents of an ACE archive.

As far as I can tell there is no way to create ace compressed files on any platform other than windoze. [more]

unarj is an ARJ un-archiver. ARJ is a classic (DOS) archiver, comparable to zip. Please note that no corresponding archiver is available for linux.

So far I have not been able to get this tool to compile cleanly under OSX, if anyone has please contact me [more]

Unstuff is an application that expands archives and decodes encoded files in multiple compressed and encoded formats using the Stuffit Engine shared library. It is a command-line utility which detects input formats automatically. It recognizes archives and encoded files by analyzing their contents instead of relying on the file extension.

This is the UNIX/Linux command line version of the Stuffit GUI tool for the Mac, and reads the same formats. [more]

Zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, DOS, OS/2, Windows 9x/NT, Amiga, Atari, Macintosh, BeOS, SMS/QDOS, MVS, VM/CMS, and others. It is analogous to a combination of the Unix commands tar(1) and compress(1) and is compatible with PKWARE's PKZIP and Nico Mak's WinZip. [more]

Zoo is a file archiving utility for maintaining collections of files. It can create and extract file archives in the "zoo" file format. It uses Lempel-Ziv compression to provide space savings in the range of 20 to 80 percent depending on the type of data.

The source code for this tool, will build under OSX, although its untested. [more]