Software Update: 7-Zip 9.04 Beta

The developers of 7-Zip released a beta release on Saturday after three alpha versions of their eponymous archiving program. The version number has arrived at 9.04. The big jump from 4.65 is due to the fact that the year of publication has recently been used as the first number. Available under the gpl license, 7-Zip can handle a variety of compression formats, including zip, cab, rar, arj, lzh, chm, gzip, bzip2, z, tar, cpio, rpm, deb, and of course the self-developed 7z. Furthermore, the software is capable of opening iso files and Nsis installation packages. Below you will find everything that has changed since version 4.65:

What’s new after 7-Zip 4.65:

• 7-Zip now can update solid .7z archives.
• 7-Zip now supports LZMA2 compression method.
• 7-Zip now supports XZ archives.
• 7-Zip now can unpack NTFS, FAT, VHD and MBR archives.
• 7-Zip now can unpack GZip, BZip2, LZMA, XZ and TAR archives from stdin.
• 7-Zip now can open/copy/compress disk images (like .c:) from . folder.
• 7-Zip File Manager now doesn’t use temp files to open nested archives stored without compression.
• New -scrc switch to calculate total CRC-32 during extracting / testing.
• New -scc{WIN|DOS|UTF-8} switch to specify charset for input/output (default = DOS).
• Some bugs were fixed.

Don’t use this beta version for important data. Call “Test” command after each compressing operation.