The receiver of a a ZIP file would then use a decompression program to extract, or 'unzip,' the file contents onto a user's computer.

It also allowed for multiple files and folders to be grouped together ('zipped') and transferred as a single ZIP file. Using ZIP compression often saved minutes or even hours off of file transfers. At that time, file transfer speeds were much slower than today. The ZIP file format dates to the late 1980s when it received heavy use in pre-internet-era Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). The ZIP file format is very popular for efficiently storing and transferring groups of files in a variety of business and personal applications. Up to date sources are available in peazip-sources Git directory, and snapshots of the source code at each x.y.z release are available in Releases as peazip-x.y.z.src.zip packages, with (featured both in Git and in source packages) containing detailed instructions for compiling the application and building packages for different systems.ZIP files group together one or more files into a single file, called an archive, while at the same time compressing them and making them smaller. The program is written in Lazarus/FreePascal (Windows installable packages are scripted with InnoSetup, with Pascal-like syntax) and offers a LGPLv3 alternative to proprietary software (WinZip, WinRar, etc), running as native application on Windows/Win64, Wine/ReactOS, Linux x86/x86-64 (with Linux ARM and BSD ports also available), and Darwin/macOS both Intel x86_64 and aarch64 (e.g.

The project aims to provide a cross-platform, portable, GUI frontend for multiple Open Source technologies (7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ/ZPAQ, PEA, UPX, Brotli, Zstd) focused on file and archive management, and security (strong encryption, two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure delete). PeaZip is a free file archiver utility and rar extractor for Linux, macOS, and Windows, which works with 200+ archive types and variants (7z, ace, arc, bz2, cab, gz, iso, paq, pea, rar, tar, wim, zip, zipx.), handles spanned archives (001, r01, z01.), supports multiple archive encryption standards, file hashing, exports tasks as console scripts.

Unzip free