libarchive

Multi-format archive and compression library.

The libarchive library features:

• Support for a variety of archive and compression formats(link is external).
• Robust automatic format detection(link is external), including archive/compression combinations such as tar.gz.
• Zero-copy internal architecture(link is external) for high performance.
• Streaming architecture eliminates all limits on size of archive, limits on entry sizes depend on particular formats.
• Carefully factored code to minimize bloat when programs are statically linked.
• Growing test suite(link is external) to verify correctness of new ports.
• Works on most POSIX-like systems (including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.)
• Supports Windows, including Cygwin, MinGW, and Visual Studio.

The bsdtar(link is external) and bsdcpio(link is external) command-line utilities are feature- and performance-competitive with other tar and cpio implementations:

• Reads a variety of formats, including tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images.
• Writes tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, ar, ISO, mtree, and shar archives.
• Automatically handles archives compressed with gzip, bzip2, lzip, xz, lzma, or compress.
• Unique format conversion feature.