The Unarchiver

In certain situations, you may encounter an archive in an unfamiliar format and you may spend a considerable amount of time looking for a utility which supports that archive type. An excellent choice is The Unarchiver. This simple and lightweight application provides support for a vast range of archive formats. It works fast and it is very easy to use, which makes it a suitable replacement for Mac OS X's Archive Utility. Furthermore, the application is absolutely free and you can have it up and running as your default archive utility in no time.

Once you run The Unarchiver.app file, a tabbed preferences panel will show up on your screen, on which you can set the application as your default archive utility and make a few tweaks to its behavior. The supported archive formats are displayed in a long list. You can select individual items, by clicking their corresponding check boxes, if you wish to extract those archive types with The Unarchiver. Also, you can select or deselect all archive formats instantly, by clicking the appropriate buttons, in the lower region of the preferences panel.

Besides selecting archive formats, you can also choose how the application should handle archives. You can set it to ask you for a destination folder each time you extract something, to store the contents in a specific folder each time or to place them in the same folder as the archive, without asking for any user input. Also, The Unarchiver can be set to store the extracted contents in a new folder, at all times or only when there are sub-folders in the archive. Additionally, the created folder's modification date can be set to the current date and time or to the archive's modification time and date.

To extract an archive's contents, you only need to double click its icon and the application will do the rest, according to your settings. Once the files are extracted, The Unarchiver may open the destination folder and move the archive to the trash automatically, if you made these settings in the preferences panel.