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The Unarchiver for Mac

By Dag Agren Free Editors' Rating

Editors' Review

shelbybrown May 11, 2017

The Unarchiver is a handy, free replacement for the MacOS stock Archive Utility, giving you more control over how and where to compress and uncompress files.

Pros

Handles more formats: The Unarchiver handles dozens of formats, including a few that the Mac's Archive Utility can't, such as RAR files. You can set The Unarchiver to be the default application for any file type it supports or just drag an archived file onto The Unarchiver icon to have it uncompress the file.

Lots of control: You where The Unarchiver extracts file and what happens to the archive file after you expand it (such as moving it to the Trash). You can also quickly find The Unarchiver in your Applications folder, unlike the Apple's own archive tool, which is buried in System/Library/CoreServices/Applications.

Cons

Not a lot of help: It's a free app, so don't expect a lot of help. Beyond a support board for the app and a bit of guidance on a slim Web page, you are on your own.

Bottom Line

If you are looking for more control over archived files on your Mac, The Unarchiver is a free and useful upgrade over what MacOS provides.

Full Specifications

What's new in version 4.2.2

RAR 1.5 extraction is working once again.
RAR 5 solid archives extraction is now working as expected.

General

Release June 4, 2020
Date Added June 4, 2020
Version 4.2.2

Operating Systems

Operating Systems Macintosh
Additional Requirements
  • macOS Catalina
  • macOS Mojave
  • macOS High Sierra
  • macOS Sierra
  • OS X El Capitan
  • OS X Yosemite
  • OS X Mavericks
  • OS X Mountain Lion
  • OS X Lion

Popularity

Total Downloads 387,856
Downloads Last Week 55
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User Reviews

4.5/5
50 User Votes
5 Star
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1 Star

Developer's Description

The Unarchiver supports more formats than I can remember. Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, 7-Zip, Rar, LhA, StuffIt, several old Amiga file and disk archives, CAB, LZX, stuff I don't even know what it is. It copies the finder file-copying/moving/deleting interface for its interface and uses the character set auto-detection code from Mozilla to auto-detect the encoding of the filenames in the archives. The Unarchiver supports split archives for certain formats, like RAR. It is built around libxad. This is an old Amiga library for handling unpacking of archives. It supports a whole lot of formats, and I added a couple more, and bugfixed old code. I also wrote a higher-level Objective-C wrapper around it, which might be useful for other projects too (including Xee).
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