libarchive/libarchive

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

3601 stars · 995 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A portable C library for reading and writing streaming archives in many formats (tar, cpio, zip, 7zip, ISO, xar, cab, rar, etc.) with automatic format detection and compression support (gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd, lzma). It also ships bsdtar, bsdcpio, bsdcat, and bsdunzip command-line tools built on the library.

Use cases

• read and write tar, zip, and cpio archives from C code
• extract archives with automatic format detection
• create compressed tar.gz or tar.zst backups
• convert archives between formats
• replace system tar, cpio, and unzip tools
• handle streaming archives larger than memory

When to choose

• you need a single library supporting many archive and compression formats
• you need streaming, zero-copy performance for huge archives
• you need a portable C solution across POSIX and Windows

When to avoid

• you only need one format and want a lighter dependency
• you need object-oriented or high-level language bindings out of the box
• you need encrypted archive formats with full feature support

Facets

library · maturity stable

compression file-system cli developer-tools files developer-tools cross-platform windows bsd cross-platform cli c archiving tar zip cpio 7zip zstd backup streaming format-detection bsdtar linux macos

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