Software Update: 7-Zip 21.04 Beta

Version 21.04 of 7-Zip has been released, a beta version. 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. The changelog for this release looks like this:

What’s new in 7-Zip 21.04 beta:

• 7-Zip now reduces the number of working CPU threads for compression, if RAM size is not enough for compression with big LZMA2 dictionary.
• 7-Zip now can create and check “file.sha256” text files that contain the list of file names and SHA-256 checksums in format compatible with sha256sum program. 7-Zip can work with such checksum files as with archives, but these files don’t contain real file data. The context menu commands to create and test “sha256” files: 7-Zip / CRC SHA / SHA-256 -> file.sha256 7-Zip / CRC SHA / Test Archive : Checksum

  The commands for command line version:

  7z a -thash file.sha256 *.txt 7z t -thash file.sha256 7z t -thash -shd. file.sha256

• New -shd{dir_path} switch to set the directory that is used to check files referenced by “file.sha256” file for “Test” operation. If -shd{dir_path} is not specified, 7-Zip uses the directory where “file.sha256” is stored.
• New -xtd switch to exclude directory items from processing.