Developer(s) Info-ZIP Written in C | Development status Active | |
Initial release August 1992; 24 years ago (1992-08) Stable release 3.00 / 7 July 2008; 8 years ago (2008-07-07) Preview release 3.1d / 15 November 2015; 15 months ago (2015-11-15) | ||
Info-ZIP is a set of open-source software to handle ZIP archives. It has been in circulation since 1989. It consists of 4 separately-installable packages: the Zip and UnZip command-line utilities; and WiZ and MacZip, which are graphical user interfaces for archiving programs in Microsoft Windows and classic Mac OS, respectively.
Contents
Info-ZIP's Zip and UnZip have been ported to dozens of computing platforms. The UnZip web page describes UnZip as "The Third Most Portable Program in the World", surpassed by Hello World, C-Kermit, and possibly the Linux kernel. The "zip" and "unzip" programs included with most Linux and Unix distributions are Info-ZIP's Zip and UnZip.
In addition to the Info-ZIP releases themselves, parts of Info-ZIP, including zlib, have been used in numerous other file archivers and other programs. Many Info-ZIP programmers have also been involved in other projects closely related to the DEFLATE compression algorithm, such as the PNG image format and the zlib software library.
Features
The UnZip package also includes three additional utilities:
The Zip package includes three additional utilities:
UnZip
UnZip 1.0 (March 1989) was released by Samuel M. Smith. It was written in Pascal and C. Pascal was abandoned soon after.
UnZip 2.0 (September 1989) was released by Samuel M. Smith. It included support for the "unimploding" (method 6) introduced by PKZIP 1.01. George Sipe created Unix version.
UnZip 2.0a (December 1989) was released by Carl Mascott and John Cowan.
In Spring 1990, Info-ZIP was formed as a mailing list on SIMTEL20, and released
UnZip 3.0 (May 1990) became the first public release by Info-ZIP group.
UnZip 4.0 (December 1990) adds support of "central directory" within .ZIP archive.
UnZip 5.0 (August 1992) introduces support of DEFLATE (method 8) compression method, used in PKZIP 1.93a. Method 8 has become the de facto base standard for ZIP archives.
In 1994 and 1995 Info-ZIP turned a corner, and effectively became the de facto ZIP program on non-MS-DOS systems. A huge number of ports were released that year, including numerous minicomputers, mainframes and practically every microcomputer ever developed.
UnZip 5.41 (April 2000) was relicensed under Info-ZIP License.
UnZip 5.50 (February 2002) adds support of Deflate64 (method 9) decompression.
UnZip 6.0 adds support of "Zip64" .ZIP archive and bzip2 (method 12) decompression. Support for bzip2-style compression was also in Zip from 3.0f beta.
Zip
Zip 1.9 (August 1992) introduces support of DEFLATE (method 8) compression method. Method 8 has become the de facto base standard for ZIP archives.
Zip 2.3 (December 1999) was the first Info-ZIP archiver tool under the new BSD-like Info-ZIP License.
Zip 3.0 (2008-07-07) supports ZIP64 .ZIP archive, more than 65536 files per archive, multi-part archive, bzip2 compression, Unicode (UTF-8) filename and (partial) comment, Unix 32-bit UIDs/GIDs
WiZ
WiZ 4.0 (November 1997) was released by Info-ZIP.
WiZ 5.01 (April 2000) was relicensed under Info-ZIP License.
MacZip
MacZip 1.05 (July 2000) was released under Info-ZIP License.
MacZip 1.06 was released in February 2001. It was written by Dirk Hasse.