Zipper

What is it?

Zipper is a tool for inspecting the contents of a compressed archive and for extracting.

I know that there's a GNUstep port of the famous OpenUp application but I must admit that for a living I have to use Windoze at work. After a while I got quite used to Winzip's UI. Although I don't like some of its features, what I really like is the content listing of an archive without actually having to unpack it. This is what Zipper currently tries to mimic. This has also the advantage that you don't have to unpack archives from networked volumes to your local disk just to view what's in it.

What does it look like?

Zipper consists only of a single window, displaying the contents of the selected archive.

What are the prerequisites?

Zipper needs (of course) GNUstep to build. The gui was made with Renaissance so you need to have the framework installed before you can build the source.
Zipper comes intentionally without the uncompression programs, so you need tar and unzip on your machine as well.

In order to build the tests you need ObjcUnit. I have patched the source to build on GNUstep and until the original authors provide a release simply grab the archive from here.

Where can I get it?

You can download Zipper here. Currently, you can view and extract .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .rar, .lha, .lhz and .zip archives.

Why is there no "Select all" menu item?

Zipper's default behaviour is to extract the entire archive if nothing is selected.

Feature Wishlist

• Add more extraction methods: zoo,arj,rpm,deb,ar
  
• Display more status/progress info when archiving and unarchiving
• Drag'n'Drop executables to the Preferences dialog
  
• Drag'n'Drop extraction to GWorkspace
• Display archive structure in NSOutlineView
• Before extracting the archive, check if files exist and ask user what should happen
• Handle password-protected archives
  

Credits

Thanks a lot to Peter Cooper for testing on *BSD platforms and sending in patches. The icons-in-name-column is courtesy Andreas Heppel.

Changelog

0.1	Initial release
0.2	Added Preferences dialog for tar and zip executable Handle failures more gracefully Parse tar output on *BSD platforms correctly Remember directories used for opening and unarchiving
0.3	Zipper can handle .rar archives
0.4	TextFields in preferences are wider so longer paths fit in Improved handling of missing unarchiver binaries
0.5	Zipper can handle plain .tar and .lha files Files can be extracted without path
0.6	When sorting by path, also consider filename Use NSOpenPanel to specify the path to the executables in Preferences dialog Added service to create .tar.gz archives Added a Menu item 'view' which extracts a file and opens it in Workspace
0.7	Improved viewing files from archive: when NSWorkspace doesn't know how to handle a file type, open it with the default app The 'open' and 'Info' menu items are now always enabled. double-clicking a row views a file (same as the 'view' menu item) The name column displays the file's icon as well as the filename
0.8	Filenames from the archive containing blanks are correctly extracted and displayed
0.9	Suppress comments from archives to make listing more reliable refactored the app to use NSDocument and friends Support for lzx archives

Send feedback to Dirk Olmes.