Extract 7z files with standard Linux tools?

Question

I know that you can extract .7z files with 7-zip.

Is there another standard Linux program that can do this? Maybe one of these

tar
bzip2
xz
gzip

I will add that bsdtar can do this, but is not available on all systems.

score 67 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 22 '13 at 15:53

7-zip archives can be extracted with p7zip (http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/) on Linux. It is included in the repositories of: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and possibly other distributions too.

List contents with (lower case L, for list):

7za l myarchive.7z

Extract contents:

7za x myarchive.7z

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '12 at 04:54

21

No. 7-Zip archives use LZMA and LZMA2, which are not supported by standard tools (they also use bzip2, but you still need to decode the header).

answered Mar 31 '12 at 04:54

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

114,604

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 31 '12 at 05:38

The "standard" way to work with 7-Zip archives on Unix is to use P7ZIP. But since the 7-Zip format was designed primarily for Windows, you shouldn't really expect P7ZIP to come installed on Linux distributions by default.

If you want the benefit of LZMA compression on Unix, prefer XZ Utils.

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 02 '23 at 19:34

I've could not find 7za in any yum repositories on RHEL/CentOS, so I've just downloaded the latest version of the source from sourceforge.net:

$ wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/16.02/p7zip_16.02_src_all.tar.bz2

(change "16.02" above to whatever latest version the time when you try to download, you can find out by going to https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/files/p7zip/ ).

Being in the directory where you downloaded the p7zip archive, unpack it:

$ tar -xvjf p7zip_16.02_src_all.tar.bz2

Then run the make command as root user inside of extracted folder:

# make
# make install

It'll produce the 7za binary in the /usr/local/bin directory (if you use RHEL7 at least):

$ whereis 7za
7za: /usr/local/bin/7za

Gryu · Answer 5 · 2019-09-19T10:11:11.943

2

7za binary is part of p7zip package could be used for that. It could be installed from epel repository if you use RHEL/OL/CentOS (tested on RHEL6/RHEL7):

RHEL6, 7:

# rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# yum install p7zip

This package have not been updated for a long time, but still could be used to extract files:

$ 7za x xyz_7zfile.7z

edited Sep 19 '19 at 10:11

answered Jun 18 '19 at 02:35

Gryu

280

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 08 '25 at 09:20

Use the official tool from 7-zip.org. To install, you can either

download the 7-Zip for Linux: console version
or build from source

To extract a file with recursive directories inside it:

7zz x file.7z

Notice that the downloaded executable is really 7zz, neither 7z, nor 7za. (See this line from the source code)

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered May 13 '25 at 05:24

0

In Debian:

apt install p7zip-full

Then to extract the file:

7za x yourfile.7z

answered May 13 '25 at 05:24

Owl

323

score 0 · Answer 8 · edited Mar 02 '23 at 16:03

0

I tried 7za on the first go but it did not work, so I tried using 7z with the same options and it works. Here is an example:

To Extract:

7z e xy213file.7z

edited Mar 02 '23 at 16:03

AsukaMinato

203

answered Nov 12 '13 at 07:22

Avinash

9

score 0 · Answer 9 · edited May 09 '19 at 13:09

0

Package p7zip is available in macports, as a binary.

Just: sudo port install p7zip

And you're away! 7z x downloads/myfile.7z

Same goes for CentOS but using yum:

sudo yum install p7zip

edited May 09 '19 at 13:09

KoNXuRo

3

answered May 07 '14 at 16:49

smci

264

Extract 7z files with standard Linux tools?

9 Answers9