Archive Manager PeaZip 6.0 is out

PeaZip 6.0 is a new version of the popular open source archive manager PeaZip for Windows that ships with new features and improvements.

PeaZip is a long standing compression program for Windows. We have first talked about it back in 2010 here on Ghacks and liked what it had to offer back then.

While the majority of features match those that other compression tools provide, PeaZip offers a selection of features such as secure deletion of files or add-on support that others usually don't provide.

As far as support for archive formats is concerned, PeaZip 6.0 supports more than 180 different formats including zip, rar, rar5, 7z, and others.

PeaZip 6.0

The official changelog highlights the main changes in the new release, especially the major code cleanup the team did, new themes that have been integrated into the application, and the introduction of full Unicode compliance.

Code cleanup is usually not something that users are interested as it is not as visible as new features or or other changes. Basically, lots of old legacy code has been removed from PeaZip 6.0 including all Windows 9x related code, and transparency is now no longer reliant on Windows but available on any operating system PeaZip runs on.

Functionality-wise, you will changes and improvements to the program's extraction and archiving functionality.

First of all, the program's 7z handling has been updated to reflect the new version of 7-Zip.

Archives that are open in the program can be deleted right away using all deletion methods (recycle, quick, zero and secure) that PeaZip has to offer. This may look like a small change, but it may be useful to users who open archives for verification before they delete it.

Another change is that folders can now be added to extraction which has PeaZip 6.0 go through the folder structure recursively adding any archive its find to the queue. This feature is available from the program's extract options, and the -ext2main parameter on the command line.

The program's test functionality supports archive files inside directories as well now which should speed things up significantly in this regard.

Eagle-eyed users of the software may also notice changes in how menus and the main toolbar are displayed in the program.

Closing Words

PeaZip 6.0 improves the archive manager in several ways, but mostly under the hood and not visible in the interface. The new features, especially the recursive crawling of folders for archives, are nice to have and will improve the handling of multiple archives that need to be extracted. All in all a solid update of a great program.

Now You: Which compression software do you use and why?