file extension CPIO

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.

It is very simple to use and install - simply copy it into your Applications folder or whereever you prefer, and then set archive filetypes to open using it. This can either be done the usual way, or by double-clicking the icon to show The Unarchiver's preferences.

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats

Unix

Unix operating systems are widely used in both servers and workstations. The Unix environment and the client-server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers.

Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, causing both to be ported to a wider variety of machine families than any other operating system. As a result, Unix became synonymous with "open systems".

Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are known as the Unix philosophy.

Under Unix, the "operating system" consists of many of these utilities along with the master control program, the kernel. The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handle the file system and other common "low level" tasks that most programs share, and, perhaps most importantly, schedules access to hardware to avoid conflicts if two programs try to access the same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel was given special rights on the system, leading to the division between user-space and kernel-space.

The microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a "normal" computer consisted of a hard disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output (I/O), the Unix file model worked quite well as most I/O was "linear". However, modern systems include networking and other new devices. As graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse, and in the 1980s non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms was augmented (sockets, shared memory, message queues, semaphores), and functionalities such as network protocols were moved out of the kernel.

IZArc

IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats.
IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more.
IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.

Key features:

• Create an archive
• Add files to an existing archive
• Delete files from an existing archive
• Extract files from an existing archive
• Test an archive file
• Convert archive
• Convert CD Images
• Repair broken archive
• Searching for any files in many archives
• Favorite Folders
• Obtaining a detailed list of files and information like compression rate, path, or size from an archive file
• Supports both long and short 8.3 filenames
• Disk spanning from and to multiple diskettes or other removable media
• Implementing the possibility to sort the list items by name size, date and etc.
• Full Drag and Drop support
• CD/DVD Images support (ISO, BIN, MDF, NRG, IMG, C2D, PDI, CDI)
• Integrating in Windows Explorer context menu
• Automatic installation of most software distributed in archive files
• Add/View comments in an archive
• By double-clicking onto a file in the file list, it's opened with the program associated to this file type
• CheckOut feature
• Create a self-extracting archive
• E-mail an archive
• Checking for new updates
• Build-in multilanguage support
• Virus Scan feature
• UU/XX/MIME Encode/Decode
• Create Multi-Volume Set
• Merge Multi-Volume Set
• UnSFX (Convert self-extracting (SFX) .EXE files to standard archives)
• Encrypt files using Rijandael - AES (256-bits) encryption
• Zip encryption (WinZip 9 compatible)
• BZip compression for ZIP archives
• Decrypt (.ize) files

The main features of 7-Zip

• 7-Zip is open source software. Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license. You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don't need to register or pay for 7-Zip. But you can make a donation to support further development of 7-Zip.
• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for more than 60 languages

GNU cpio copies files into or out of a cpio or tar archive. The archive can be another file on the disk, a magnetic tape, or a pipe.
GNU cpio supports the following archive formats: binary, old ASCII, new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar, and POSIX.1 tar. The tar format is provided for compatability with the tar program.
By default, cpio creates binary format archives, for compatibility with older cpio programs.
When extracting from archives, cpio automatically recognizes which kind of archive it is reading and can read archives created on machines with a different byte-order.