7-Zip: Free and Open Source File Archive Utility for all Windows and Linux

Most of the times we here at AskVG post various articles which feature themes, utilities, registry scripts, etc. These things are provided for download in ZIP file format and we always suggest you to use 7-Zip to extract those ZIP files. Recently when I posted article about 7-Zip theme manager, I realized that there is not any dedicated article for this awesome utility at AskVG. That was quite surprising for me.

So today in this article, we are going to feature this excellent file archive utility so that more and more people can know about it.

"7-Zip" is a free file archive utility which allows you to unpack/extract wide range of formats like ZIP, RAR, GZIP, 7z, RPM, MSI, ISO, CAB, DMG, VHD, WIM, TAR, etc. 7-Zip is one of the most popular and our favorite file archiver. The default file format used by this software is 7z.

It can be installed in almost all Windows versions including Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista,Windows 7 and Windows 8. Its command line version is also available for Linux/Unix.

7-Zip is an open source program. Most of its source code is under the GNU LGPL license. The unRAR code is under a mixed license: GNU LGPL + unRAR restrictions.

Features List:

• High compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Supported formats for packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
• Supported formats for unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.
• Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 79 languages
• Its a very light-weight software and doesn't take much memory of your system.
• 7-Zip can be downloaded for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows OS. At the time of writing this article, the latest version available of 7-Zip is 9.20 and a beta version 9.22 is also available for testing. There is another alpha version 9.23 available.

You can download it using following link:

Download Links for All Versions of 7-Zip

How to Download???

1. Click on the download link

2. Wait for few seconds and then click on

Do you also use 7-Zip in your system? If you use any other file archiver, please let us know in your comment.