7z is the must have brother of busybox even for Linux used as command line shell!
# 7z author said
change 4kb to 2MB (huge page kernel) for RAM/kernel page for +10%-20% speed for
some Windows apps, (so why not for linux). I think is also
multi-threading for x86-64.
7z hashers: CRC32/64 MD5 SHA1/2/3 SHA224 SHA256 SHA3-224/256/384/512 SHA384 SHA512-224/256 BLAKE2b/sp XXH64 cksum asc
7z Codecs: BCJ{2} BZIP2 LZMA{2} Deflate{64} Rar1/2/3/5 Delta Copy AES256CBC 7zAES PPMD Swap{2,4} CPU-type (PPC IA64 ARM ARMT SPARC ARM64 RISCV)
7z knows
Real-disk-containers (type
GPT +
UEFI and
MBR),
CDrom/DVD (type
ISO and
UDF),
disk-filesytems (Windows:
FAT/32 or
NTFS; Apple:
HFS and
APFS; Linux:
Swap),
virtual-disk-containers (Windows:
WIM and
VHD or
VHDX; VirtualBox;
VDI; VmWare:
VMDK; Qemu:
QCOW2; Linux:
SquashFS and
CramFS and
CPIO),
compressed-file-formats (Windows: ARJ,
CAB, MSI, NSIS, CHM, RAR ZIP; Linux:
AR, LZH, LZMA/2, RPM, Z, XAR, Bzip2, gzip, xz, zstd, tar).
Because of common compression algorithms used in various file format, it can see the structures of
DMG,
EXT,
IHEX, even for Libreoffice/ MsOffice
xlsx, docx, etc.
I would like a GUI for it, because not all commands have all switches /options suitable. I wonder if somebody already though about a GUI, written in sh or Xdialog or preferable FLTK (but not in GTK* or QT). The idea is that the "master" program to have an external TEXT file which can be searched with
awk for DIFFERENT delimiters specific for CMD (commands), SWITCHES, OPTIONS, FORMATS etc. For example CMD (list/extract/add/delete) separated by "=", SWITCHES separated by "TAB", like a 3D matrix.
Because 7z uses not only named file extensions, but
search the header of files/containers/disk (like libarchive does), it could be suitable for
fluff file manager extensions to provide actions, or can be used stand alone.
The main program would set the default (but changeable) settings like WORKDIR (/tmp/$mktmp), benchmarks, info, chksums(=CRS32), INPUT ($3), OUTPUT($4) (list= $PAGER) etc.
I read the help to prototype something/skeleton, for now just studding the TC scripts about ash syntax for using case + getoptions. No promises but I can help others to build the GUI if there are interested volunteers.
❯ 7z i
7-Zip 25.01 (x64) : Copyright (c) 1999-2025 Igor Pavlov : 2025-08-03
64-bit locale=en_US.UTF-8 Threads:12 OPEN_MAX:1024, ASM
Libs:
0 : 25.01 : /usr/lib/7zip/7z.so