Libarchive

libarchive's development was started in 2003 as part of the FreeBSD project.^[1] During the early years it was led by the FreeBSD project, but later it became an independent project.^[4] It was first released with FreeBSD 5.3 in November 2004.^[5]

libarchive automatically detects and reads archive formats.^[6] If the archive is compressed, libarchive also detects and handles compression formats before evaluating the archive.^[6] libarchive is designed to minimize the copying of data internally for optimal performance.^[7]

Supported archive formats:^[8]

• 7z – read and write
• ar – read and write
• cab – read only
• cpio – read and write
• ISO9660 – read and write
• lha & lzh – read only
• pax – read and write
• rar – read only
• shar – write only
• tar – read and write
• warc (ISO 28500:2009) – read and write
• xar – read and write
• zip – read and write

libarchive provides command-line utilities called bsdtar and bsdcpio.^[3] These are complete re-implementation based on libarchive.^[9][10] These are the default system tar and cpio on FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS and Windows.^[5]

There is also bsdcat, designed to decompress a file to the standard output like zcat.^[11]

libarchive was originally developed for FreeBSD, but is also used in NetBSD and macOS as part of those operating systems.^[5]

bsdtar has been included in Windows since Windows 10 April 2018 Update.^[12] In May 2023, Microsoft announced Windows 11 will natively support additional archive formats such as 7z and RAR via libarchive.^[13]