7-Zip is a popular file archiver providing high compression ratios using the LZMA, LZMA2, and the new 7z format for compression. It’s prevalent among users of the Windows operating systems, making its use quite widespread.
However, there wasn’t any official release of 7-Zip for Linux until recently. The 21.01 alpha version of 7-Zip is now released for the Linux operating system. In this article, we will discuss how to install 7-Zip on any Linux distribution.
How to Install 7-Zip in Linux
You can now install the 7-Zip package on your Linux machine without resorting to any third-party forks. Simply download the 7-Zip binary and move it to the appropriate path on your system.
wget https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2101-linux-x64.tar.xzType the above command in your terminal to fetch the tar archive file for the 7-Zip binary. If you don’t have wget on your Linux installation, use the curl command instead.
curl -O https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2101-linux-x64.tar.xzOnce the download has finished, proceed to extract the archive. You can open the downloaded file using the following command.
tar xf 7z2101-linux-x64.tar.xzUnpacking the tar file will yield the 7-Zip binary named 7zz. You can now run 7-zip on Linux using the following command.
./7zzYou’ll need to enter the entire path to this binary when using 7zip from a different working directory. Add the binary to your /usr/local/bin directory to get around this issue.
mv 7zz /usr/local/binNow you can access 7-Zip from anywhere on the filesystem using the 7zz command.
7-Zip vs. p7zip: Which One Should I Use?
p7zip, a reliable 7-Zip port is available on many popular Linux distros. The p7zip utility offers many 7zip-specific features related to file compression and archival. Although it’s not heavily maintained, p7zip still provides excellent performance on Linux-based operating systems.
You can use any of these tools for compressing and decompressing files into the 7z format. We recommend you try the new 7-Zip release since it’s official. It will also be easier to track bugs and get help from the developers in case you bump into any issues.
Handling 7-Zip Archives on Linux
The official release of 7-Zip for Linux has made managing 7z archives easier than ever. Users who constantly deal with compressed files can now utilize this tool for managing their archives effortlessly.
There are a lot of compression formats that Linux supports, including the gz format. In case you have a gz file on your system instead, you can unzip it using the terminal or a GUI app.