ZIP 
is a
popular archiving format, mainstream on Windows systems;
ZIP
file format specifications are mantained by PKWare
which originally developed the format.
Newer archive formats like 7Z, RAR and ACE have gained popularity and
introduced several improvements (some of them then brought into ZIP
format) like better compression ratio, recovery records, strong
encryption etc, but ZIP format retained much of its popularity gained
in several years of widespread use.
ZIP compression is quite fast and it's based on Deflate algorithm (like
in
GZip format); alternatively
Deflate64 or
BZip2 based compression is
possible, and supported by PeaZip.
Recently WinZip (probably the most popular zip file utility on Windows
platform) introduced Advanced Encryption (
AE ), an AES based
authenticated encryption scheme; AE-encrypted archives and classic
ZipCrypto-encrypted archives are supported by PeaZip.
PeaZip can
create and extract
ZIP archives on Linux and Windows
platform (it can also zip and unzip separate archives at once), and
also allows to productively work with zip files:
- add/remove files from archives;
- browse and search archive's content;
- preview objects into zip files;
- partial archive's extraction, unzipping only selected
or filtered objects.
