7-Zip 9.34 Final is now available

Update:  It appears that the release is still an alpha for now. What has been added recently are the source codes of the release. It is not clear yet when the final release will be available.

7-Zip has been my archiving program of choice until recently. The main issue that I had with it was that its development was slow paced and that support for new archive formats such as RAR5 was not integrated as a result.

I switched to the excellent Bandizip because of it which supports the format and is as convenient to use as 7-Zip (maybe even more so).

With that said, I paid attention to 7-Zip's development to make sure that I would not miss a new version.

Today that time has come. The new 7-Zip 9.34 final has been uploaded to the Sourceforge website.

The official website has not been updated yet with information which means that the only changelog information available are for the alpha build and not the final build.

If you have followed development of the program you may know that several alpha versions have been released after the release of the last final version 7-Zip 9.20 released in 2010.

This means that users of the most recent stable version 9.20 will notice many new features while users of the most recent alpha version 9.34 not as many or none at all.

The history information on the official 7-Zip website end with version 9.33 at the time of writing. Information about version 9.34 alpha are only available on the forum right now:

• The BUG in 9.33 was fixed: Command line version of 7-Zip could work incorrectly, if there is relative path in exclude filename optiton (-x) and absolute path as include filename.
• The BUG in 9.26-9.33 was fixed: 7-Zip could not open some unusual 7z archives that were created by another software (not by 7-Zip).
• The BUG in 9.31-9.33 was fixed: 7-Zip could crash with switch -tcab

As you see nothing major but still useful to users who ran into those bugs. There is still a chance that features have been added after the changelog has been posted.

Here is a list of major changes implemented in the program after version 9.20 was released:

• UEFI Bios files can be unpacked.
• LZMA decompression speed improved.
• More email clients supported for the compress and send to email feature.
• Files can now be moved into archives.
• New switches for the command line version such as rn to rename files in archives or -sdel to delete files after adding them to an archive.
• Speed improvements when opening large archives and large folders on hard drives.
• Multi-volume self-extracting archives now supported in 7z format.
• Files larger than 4GB in ISO files supported.

Closing Words

7-Zip users who are running the stable version 9.20 get an upgrade to a new stable version finally after more than four years. Users of the alpha version can also upgrade to the final version but won't notice nearly as many new features than 9.20 users.

As far as RAR5 support is concerned, it is still not integrated into the program.