Xarchiver is a front-end

Front-end and back-end

Front end and back end are generalized terms that refer to the initial and the end stages of a process. The front end is responsible for collecting input in various forms from the user and processing it to conform to a specification the back end can use...

 to various command line archiving

File archiver

A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage...

 tools for Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and BSD

Berkeley Software Distribution

Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s, designed to be independent of the desktop environment

Desktop environment

In graphical computing, a desktop environment commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface derived from the desktop metaphor that is seen on most modern personal computers. These GUIs help the user in easily accessing, configuring, and modifying many important and frequently accessed...

. It is the default archiving application of Xfce

Xfce

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD – though recent compatibility issues have arisen with regard to BSD Unix platforms...

 and LXDE

LXDE

LXDE is a free and open source desktop environment for Unix and other POSIX compliant platforms, such as Linux or BSD. The goal of the project is to provide a desktop environment that is fast and energy efficient...

.

It uses the GTK+

GTK+

GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...

2 toolkit to provide the program interface; therefore it is capable of running on any system where GTK+2 support exists. A large number of other applications also use the toolkit, so support is widespread among other Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

s irrespective of their specific desktop solution.

Supported formats at this time (version 0.5.2) with an appropriate installed program are 7z

7z

7z is a compressed archive file format that supports several different data compression, encryption and pre-processing algorithms. The 7z format initially appeared as implemented by the 7-Zip archiver. The 7-Zip program is publicly available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public...

, ARJ

ARJ

ARJ is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.85 for DOS and 3.15 for Windows and supports 16-bit and 32-bit Intel architectures.ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers for DOS and Windows during early and...

, bzip2

Bzip2

bzip2 is a free and open source implementation of the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It is developed and maintained by Julian Seward. Seward made the first public release of bzip2, version 0.15, in July 1996.-Compression efficiency:...

, gzip

Gzip

Gzip is any of several software applications used for file compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU Project's implementation, "gzip" standing for GNU zip. It is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding...

, LHA

LHA (file format)

LHA is a freeware compression utility and associated file format. It was created in 1988 by , and originally named LHarc. A complete rewrite of LHarc, tentatively named LHx, was eventually released as LH. It was then renamed to LHA to avoid conflicting with the then-new MS-DOS 5.0 LH command...

, lzma, lzop

Lzop

lzop is a free software file compression tool which uses LZO and is under the GPL license.Aimed at being very fast, lzop produces files a bit larger than gzip's but with less than a tenth of the CPU use. On many benchmark sites lzop is one of the fastest compressors available...

, RAR, RPM

RPM Package Manager

RPM Package Manager is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself...

, DEB

Deb (file format)

deb is the extension of the Debian software package format and the most often used name for such binary packages. Like the "Deb" part of the term Debian, it originates from the name of Debra, erstwhile girlfriend and now ex-wife of Debian's founder Ian Murdock.Debian packages are also used in...

, tar

Tar (file format)

In computing, tar is both a file format and the name of a program used to handle such files...

, and ZIP

ZIP (file format)

Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

. Xarchiver uses the Direct Save Protocol XDS

Direct Save Protocol

The Direct Save Protocol, abbreviated XDS , is a software protocol that supports saving files by dragging them to file manager windows....

 for drag and drop file saving. The program acts as a front-end

Front-end and back-end

Front end and back end are generalized terms that refer to the initial and the end stages of a process. The front end is responsible for collecting input in various forms from the user and processing it to conform to a specification the back end can use...

for various commonly installed libraries dealing with the supported compression formats. Xarchiver can't create archives whose archiver is not installed.

Currently, the Xfce master branch of Xarchiver is being continued at github.

External links

• Continuation at github