WinRAR allows you to browse a .tar.gz without extracting it, 7-zip extracts the .tar to a temp file. It makes working with large .tar.gz files impossible.
(Yes I know that because of how .tar works WinRAR must decompresses it to build the files list. But it beats having to write a 1TB .tar to disk just to see the file listing.
tar.gz files don't have a central directory (like zip), and they are compressed as one stream (almost always non-seekable)
What might help is saving the state of the decompressor periodically, rather than just the index in the file. But that's getting pretty far into the weeds for an optimization to an infrequently used feature.
.gz does not give you enough information to randomly seek within the big compressed .gz file, so you cannot skip past files within a .tar archive.
But if you load a .gz file and consume the entire stream, but keep periodic checkpoints of your past sliding window (about 64KB) every 1MB or so, you can get random access with 1MB granularity. You still had to consume the entire stream to build the lookup though.
No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.
E: Tried again with procmon monitoring 7-zip, and after it completed writing the file it deleted it.
Sometimes you see a word used a new way and wonder if you've just been wrong all these years.
You'll see codec used in things like text encoding.
doctorpangloss•7h ago
FirmwareBurner•7h ago
It didn't ship in the distant past due to anti-competitive reasons but it is there now.
doctorpangloss•7h ago
FirmwareBurner•7h ago
Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions.
> Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck?
And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different meaning than what you say you meant.
Dylan16807•7h ago
And it's only because of that comment that I learned windows 11 finally improves things.
jchw•7h ago
I can't really stomach Windows 11 so I don't personally use it but my understanding is that the latest version of Windows 11 has finally integrated a better solution, implementing archive extraction based on libarchive.
rjsw•7h ago
FirmwareBurner•7h ago
monster_truck•7h ago
jore•7h ago
gertop•7h ago
In 11 (and maybe later 10 updates) they added 7z and rar support.
OptionOfT•3h ago
When you open a .tar.gz or a .rar that button is gone.
For those you need to do right mouse on the .tar.gz or .rar and click "Extract All...".
I miss the days when Windows' UI was consistent.
lousken•7h ago
the issue is that it sucks, it's at least 10x slower than 7 zip, maybe more, showing lots of files/folders freezes the explorer gui on w10 and it only supports .zip (which could've been changed on w11, never used, never tried)
jchw•7h ago
genocidicbunny•6h ago
Dwedit•5h ago
genocidicbunny•4h ago
Dwedit•6h ago
Suppafly•6h ago
I'm not sure I'd tell people I did that if it were me.
jccalhoun•6h ago
Suppafly•6h ago