Zipper

What is it?

Zipper is a tool for inspecting the contents of a compressed archive and for extracting.

I know that there's a GNUstep port of the famous OpenUp application but I must admit that for a living I have to use Windoze at work. After a while I got quite used to Winzip's UI. Although I don't like some of its features, what I really like is the content listing of an archive without actually having to unpack it. This is what Zipper currently tries to mimic. This also has the advantage that you don't have to unpack archives from networked volumes to your local disk just to view what's in it.

What does it look like?

Zipper only consists of a single window displaying the contents of the selected archive.

[Zipper Screenshot]

What are the prerequisites?

Zipper needs (of course) GNUstep. The gui was made with Renaissance so you need to have the framework installed before you can build the source and run the application.
Zipper comes intentionally without the uncompression programs, so you need the appropriate archiver programs on your machine as well.

In order to build the tests you need ObjcUnit. I have patched the source to build on GNUstep and until the original authors provide a release simply grab the archive from here.

Which (un)compression programs are supported?

Program
decompression
supported
creating archives
supported
lha
X

lzx
X

tar (including compression with gzip and bzip if your installed tar supports that) X
X (.tar.gz)
rar
X

zip
X

7z or 7za
X

Where can I get it?

You can download Zipper here.

Why is there no "Select all" menu item?

Zipper's default behaviour is to extract the entire archive if nothing is selected.

Feature Wishlist

Credits

Thanks a lot to Peter Cooper for testing on *BSD platforms and sending in patches. The icons-in-name-column is courtesy Andreas Heppel.

Changelog

0.1
  • Initial release
0.2
  • Added Preferences dialog for tar and zip executable
  • Handle failures more gracefully
  • Parse tar output on *BSD platforms correctly
  • Remember directories used for opening and unarchiving
0.3
  • Zipper can handle .rar archives
0.4
  • TextFields in preferences are wider so longer paths fit in
  • Improved handling of missing unarchiver binaries
0.5
  • Zipper can handle plain .tar and .lha files
  • Files can be extracted without path
0.6
  • When sorting by path, also consider filename
  • Use NSOpenPanel to specify the path to the executables in Preferences dialog
  • Added service to create .tar.gz archives
  • Added a Menu item 'view' which extracts a file and opens it in Workspace
0.7
  • Improved viewing files from archive: when NSWorkspace doesn't know how to handle a file type, open it with the default app
  • The 'open' and 'Info' menu items are now always enabled.
  • double-clicking a row views a file (same as the 'view' menu item)
  • The name column displays the file's icon as well as the filename
0.8
  • Filenames from the archive containing blanks are correctly extracted and displayed
0.9
  • Suppress comments from archives to make listing more reliable
  • refactored the app to use NSDocument and friends
  • Support for lzx archives
1.0
  • Cosmetic changes as proposed by Rob Burns
  • Handling of plain .gz files (e.g. README.gz). I'd like to improve Zipper here a little bit more in the future.
1.1
  • Bugfix: open zip files with comments
1.2
  • Try to determine the file type by the file's content before resorting to the file extension. This is necessary as some file extensions are ambiguous.
  • I finally restructured the code so that not all possible archivers need to be filled when closing the preferences panel. Now if you open an archive that does not have a valid archiver specified the preferences panel will open.
1.3
  • Resolve an issue with 7zip archives on system where only the 7za binary is avaliable but no 7z executable (Thanks to Richard Stonehouse for reporting this issue)
  • The output of unzip changed, causing Zipper to skip the first entry in the zip file. This is fixed now by using -qq when listing the zip file, this skips all nice headers and footers that unzip displays.

Send feedback to Dirk Olmes.