Software Update: 7-Zip 18.01

Version 18.01 of 7-Zip has been released. This open source archiver can handle a wide range of compression formats, including zip, cab, rar, arj, lzh, chm, gzip, bzip2, z, tar, cpio, rpm, deb and of course the proprietary 7z. Furthermore, the software is able to open iso files and nsis installation packages. Since version 16, the program can handle large Z01, z02, etc., zip files scattered over several files. Support for zip.001, zip.002 and so on was already there. The following changes have been made in this version:

What’s new after 7-Zip 18.00 beta:

• 7-Zip now can unpack DMG archives that use LZFSE compression method.
• 7-Zip now doesn’t allow update operation for archives that have read-only attribute.
• The BUG was fixed: extracting from tar with -si switch didn’t set timestamps for directories.
• Some bugs were fixed.

For those who missed the changes in the beta versions, they are summarized as follows:

What’s new after 7-Zip 16.04:

• Minor speed optimization for LZMA2 (xz and 7z) multi-threading compression. 7-Zip now uses additional memory buffers for multi-block LZMA2 compression. CPU utilization was slightly improved.
• 7-zip now creates multi-block xz archives by default. Block size can be specified with -ms[Size]{m|g} switch.
• xz decoder now can unpack random block from multi-block xz archives. 7-Zip File Manager now can open nested multi-block xz archives (for example, image.iso.xz) without full unpacking of xz archive.
• 7-Zip now can create zip archives from stdin to stdout.
• ZIP unpacking code was improved.
• 7-Zip now can unpack OBJ/COFF files.
• 7-Zip now can unpack DMG archives that use LZFSE compression method.
• 7-Zip now doesn’t allow update operation for archives that have read-only attribute.
• 7-Zip command line: @listfile now doesn’t work after — switch. Use -i@listfile before — switch instead.
• new -sse switch to stop archive creating, if 7-Zip can’t open some input file.
• 7-Zip now reserves file space before writing to file (for extraction from archive). It can reduce file fragmentation.
• Internal changes in code.
• The BUGs were fixed: 7-Zip could add unrequired alternate file streams to WIM archives, for commands that contain filename wildcards and -sns switch. Extracting from tar with -si switch didn’t set timestamps for directories.
• Some bugs were fixed. 7-Zip could crash in some cases.