Mac Monday: The Unarchiver

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/theunarchiver.html

Compatible platforms: 10.3.9 (Panther with updates to .9 version) & up

Version highlighted in this post: 2.0

OS X has a great built-in utility for extracting and making basic archive files. You’ve probably used it, but may not have ever noticed it since it’s so tightly integrated into the OS. It’s called BOM Archive Helper. But if your needs go beyond the basics of standard zip files and the like, and you find yourself working with file types like RAR that allow spanning across multiple volumes, and 7z (7-zip) files that have great compression ratios, you’ll quickly hit BOM Archive Helper’s limits.

Fortunately, Apple created The Unarchiver and is offering it up absolutely free. Rather than run through the nice, big list of all the file types The Unarchiver handles, I’ll let the screenshot speak for itself.

That’s an incredible list. A list so thorough that I’d rank The Unarchiver’s capabilities right up there with the best PC archival programs (e.g. 7-Zip and PeaZip).