Extract 7z files with standard linux tools?

Question

I know that you can extract .7z files with 7-zip.

Is there another standard linux program that can do this? Maybe one of these

tar
bzip2
xz
gzip

I will add that bsdtar can do this, but is not available on all systems.

Solution 1

No. 7-Zip archives use LZMA and LZMA2, which are not supported by standard tools (they also use bzip2, but you still need to decode the header).

Solution 2

7-zip archives can be extracted with p7zip (http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/) on Linux. It is included in the repositories of: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and possibly other distributions too.

List contents with (lower case L, for list):

7za l myarchive.7z

Extract contents:

7za x myarchive.7z

Solution 3

7za binary is part of p7zip package could be used for that. It could be installed from epel repository if you use RHEL/OL/CentOS (tested on RHEL6/RHEL7):

RHEL6, 7:

# rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# yum install p7zip

This package have not been updated for a long time, but still could be used to extract files:

$ 7za x xyz_7zfile.7z

Solution 4

I've could not find 7za in any yum repositories on RHEL/CentOS, so I've just downloaded the latest version of source from sourceforge.net:

$ wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/16.02/p7zip_16.02_src_all.tar.bz2

(change "16.02" above to whatever latest version at time when you try to download, you can find out by going to https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/ ).

Being in the directory where you downloaded p7zip archive, unpack it:

$ tar -xvjf p7zip_16.02_src_all.tar.bz2

Then run make command as root user inside of extracted folder:

# make
# make install

It'll produce 7za binary in /usr/local/bin directory (if you use RHEL7 at least):

$ whereis 7za
7za: /usr/local/bin/7za

Solution 5

The "standard" way to work with 7-Zip archives on Unix is to use P7ZIP. But since the 7-Zip format was designed primarily for Windows, you shouldn't really expect P7ZIP to come installed on Linux distributions by default.

If you want the benefit of LZMA compression on Unix, prefer XZ Utils.

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Comments

[Santosh Kumar]

similar question : 7zip for linux

[Ciro Santilli Путлер Капут 六四事]

askubuntu.com/questions/219392/how-can-i-uncompress-a-7z-fil‌​e

[jjlin]

Actually, xz uses LZMA as well. But yes, it still won't understand the rest of the 7z format.

[Deliss]

p7zip is available in macports, as a binary. Just: sudo port install p7zip

[rivu]

on 64 bit RHEL 6, yum install p7zip.x86_64, and, if needed, yum install p7zip-plugins.x86_64

[Dan M.]

It's funny how I was able to create a 7z archive via right-click compress, but was unable to decompress it afterwards xD classic linux.