libarchive

The source distribution includes the libarchive library, the bsdtar and bsdcpio command-line programs, full test suite, and documentation.

• Stable release: 3.8.4 (Dec 01, 2025) tar.xz tar.gz zip
• Current Development Sources: Tar.gz of github master branch Zip of github master branch
• Legacy releases

The libarchive library features:

• Support for a variety of archive and compression formats.
• Robust automatic format detection, including archive/compression combinations such as tar.gz.
• Zero-copy internal architecture for high performance.
• Streaming architecture eliminates all limits on size of archive, limits on entry sizes depend on particular formats.
• Carefully factored code to minimize bloat when programs are statically linked.
• Growing test suite to verify correctness of new ports.
• Works on most POSIX-like systems (including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.)
• Supports Windows, including Cygwin, MinGW, and Visual Studio.

The bsdtar and bsdcpio command-line u1tilities are feature- and performance-competitive with other tar and cpio implementations:

• Reads a variety of formats, including tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images.
• Writes tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, ar, ISO, mtree, and shar archives.
• Automatically handles archives compressed with gzip, bzip2, lzip, xz, lzma, or compress.
• Unique format conversion feature.

Documentation Links:

• Build Instructions
• Examples of using the library
• Formats supported by the library
• Manpages included in the distribution
• Libarchive Users
• Release Notes
• Ideas for people who want to contribute

License

New BSD License

Issue Tracker

The issue tracker for libarchive is hosted on GitHub.
To report a general issue, use the issue tracker. For pull requests, use GitHub's pull request feature.

Contiuous Build

Mailing Lists

Download

Downloads for all releases are available at the downloads page (downloads).

You can download this project in either zip or tar formats.

You can also clone the project with Git by running:

      $ git clone https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive