Is there any huge difference between 7zip and normal zip , is the difference in their alogrithmic structure ..
Can anybody provide info please ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...rchive_formats

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...file_archivers

Indeed the difference is colossal.

7zip the format uses lzma compression and supports other features such as encryption, volumes, etc. It's much like rar only better and free, that I think makes rar obsolete.

zip is an old compression format, it's not very good at anything, doesn't have many features. In fact, the only reason anyone uses it is because M$ supports it by default. Other than that it's useless.

If i remember well, linus wanted to use this algorithm for linux kernel archives.

Using the plain ZIP format is easier for the plain reason that the format is supported by almost all systems, ranging from Macintosh to Windows.

7zip has a lot of excellent features, but it needs 7zip to be installed to really be able to access packages compressed with those features. This can be a problem if you are sending email ZIP attachments to companies or institutions, where employees have only limited options for installing custom tools. Sometimes there is even a policy that prevents anything non-standard to be installed.

So the choice of tool should be based on where and how your packages will be used.

Debian

But 7z supports a wide range of architectures, from Windows to posix compliant systems like Linux, MacOS, BeOS, many BSD flavors, Solarix, Cygwin and probably many more.

But there's a real need. All in all I consider it's idiotic to transfer 10 MB if you can transfer the same contents in 2MB (extreme case, I am just illustrating though). In the past almost 100% of the people used to believe that the Earth was flat. Was it easy to change that? No. But that's no excuse not to try hard.

By the way, the only real case where you can't use 7z is when your home partition is mounted noexec. In the rest of the cases, you might not be able to install anything system wide, but you can download and use whatever you want in your user account.

Not being able to install anything system wide might be a pain in windows, but we, as linux users have no problem with that. Because it has always been that way and we know that it is a good thing, and not something that an evil administrator does to bother us.

That's true, though.

On topic again:

Yep. It can use other compression methods though, just as the gzip deflate method or even bzip2, I think it's all in the man page.

It never was that good. In fact, I have no idea why the hell it has gotten that famous. But we are already awared that usually it's not the top-quality product which triumphs

zip might be now integrated in window but at the time of window2k i remembered how many times i had to click on this bloody nag screen in winzip.. Until i got the crack and then switched to 7-zip for .7z and .zip(when they where allowed to implement it).
7zip doesnt need to be installed.

The nag in Winzip was one of the the reasons I switched to 7zip as well.. why have shareware that you SHOULD pay for if there is a free alternative? Not that I have anything against the makers of pkzip / winzip Sure they should profit from their products, but at the same time Why should I 'illegally' run an unregistered product when a free solution exists.. The choices where pay or switch in order to do the right thing. I switched.

Yes this was pre windows zip integration as well.

Another 2 cents worth: I am a *nix newbie but a M$ oldie. I use 7Zip in both places because it's free, legal, and does everything I have ever wanted to do with compression software.