p7zip VS 7-Zip-zstd

nearly every main distro I am aware of has both available. The reason you still see p7zip is because the CLI incompatibilities vs the newer 7z/7zip executables and the general licensing issues. Most users of "old p7zip" are actually using the actively maintained https://github.com/p7zip-project/p7zip which is updated, supporting unix permissions and zstd and so on.

Thank you for pointing this out! This is the source of much confusion. Although Arch for example uses https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip which seems to be reasonably maintained?

Then you can compile p7zip from source: $ mkdir p7zip-git $ cd p7zip-git $ git clone https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip .

April 4th was the latest release. Had some commits in May. I think it is active.

I think the point is, the '7z' at 17.04 available in Arch Linux's repo is actually p7zip, the development of which is independent of 7-zip. So comparison of the version number is meaningless (if I am right). Also, p7zip 17.04 is released in April this year, not 2017, according to its release page

this comment might clarify that.

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.