Developer(s) Giorgio Tani | Development status Active | |
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Initial release September 16, 2006; 10 years ago (2006-09-16) Stable release 6.3.1 / February 6, 2017; 45 days ago (2017-02-06) Operating system | ||
PeaZip is a free and open-source file manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows, Linux and BSD made by Giorgio Tani. It supports its native PEA archive format (featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption and integrity check schemes) and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. It supports 188 file extensions (as of version 6.0.0).
Contents
PeaZip is mainly written in Free Pascal, using Lazarus. PeaZip is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Features
The program features an archive browser interface with search and history features for intuitive navigation in archive's content, and allows the application of fine-grained multiple exclusion and inclusion filter rules to the archive; a flat browsing mode is possible as alternative archive browsing method.
PeaZip allows users to run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. It can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout for speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition.
Other notable features of the program includes archive conversion, file splitting and joining, secure file deletion, byte-to-byte file comparison, archive encryption, checksum/hash files, find duplicate files, batch renaming, system benchmarking, random passwords/keyfiles generation, view image thumbnails (multi threaded on the fly thumbnails generation without saving image cache to the host machine), and integration in the Windows Explorer context menu. In addition, the program's user interface (including icons and color scheme) can be customized.
PeaZip is available for IA-32 and x86-64 as natively standalone, portable application and as installable package for Microsoft Windows, Linux (DEB, RPM and TGZ, compiled both for GTK2 and Qt widgetset), and BSD (GTK2). It is available also as PortableApps package (.paf.exe).
Along with more popular and general-purpose archive formats like 7z, Tar, Zip etc., PeaZip supports the PAQ and LPAQ formats. Although usually not recommended for general purpose use (due to high memory usage and low speed), those formats are included for the value as cutting edge compression technology, providing compression ratio amongst the best for most data structures.
PeaZip supports encryption with AES 256-bit cipher in 7z, and ZIP archive formats. In PeaZip's native PEA format, and in FreeArc's ARC format, supported ciphers are AES 256-bit, Blowfish, Twofish 256 and Serpent 256 (in PEA format, all ciphers are used in EAX authenticated encryption mode).
Limitations
The graphical frontend's progress bar is less reliable than the native console's progress indicator for the various backend utilities.
If it is critical to follow the real time progress of the work it is possible to set the program to use the native console interface, or both graphical and console interfaces, for the backend utilities.
PeaZip does not support editing files inside archives (E.g.: Open a text file, add text and save it without unzipping the file)
It also does not support adding files to subfolders in an already created archive. Adding files to archives always adds them to the root directory.
Native archive format
PEA, an acronym for Pack Encrypt Authenticate, is an archive file format. It is a general purpose archiving format featuring compression and multiple volume output. The developers' goal is to offer a flexible security model through Authenticated Encryption, that provides both privacy and authentication of the data, and redundant integrity checks ranging from checksums to cryptographically strong hashes, defining three different levels of communication to control: streams, objects, and volumes.
It was developed in conjunction with the PeaZip file archiver. PeaZip and Universal Extractor support the PEA archive format.
Third-party technologies
PeaZip acts as a graphical front-end for numerous third-party open source or royalty-free utilities, including:
Separate plugin (optional)
Most of these utilities can run both in console mode or through a graphical wrapper that allows more user-friendly handling of output information.
Repair
Adware
Prior to release 5.3, PeaZip installers for Windows and Win64 were bundled with an OpenCandy advertising module, which during installation offered optional installation of recommended third-party software; the official download page provided alternative installers without this module, named 'plain'. From release 5.3 on, PeaZip no longer has ad-supported bundle. PeaZip Portable and PeaZip for Linux packages never featured an ad-supported bundle.