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[](https://ziplark.com)
**Free, fast, cross-platform archiver.** Extracts ZIP, RAR (incl. RAR5), 7z,
tar, ISO and the common compressed-tar variants; creates ZIP (with AES-256), 7z
and tar archives. One small Rust engine, three ways to drive it: a desktop app,
a CLI, and an MCP server.
[**Download**](https://ziplark.com/#download) · [Website](https://ziplark.com) · [Report a bug](https://github.com/zhitongblog/ziplark/issues)
## Install
```bash
# macOS — Homebrew
brew install --cask zhitongblog/tap/ziplark # desktop app
brew install zhitongblog/tap/ziplark # CLI + MCP (ziplark, ziplark-mcp)
```
```powershell
# Windows — Scoop (CLI + MCP)
scoop bucket add ziplark https://github.com/zhitongblog/scoop-bucket
scoop install ziplark
```
Or grab a build for any platform from the [releases page](https://github.com/zhitongblog/ziplark/releases/latest)
(macOS `.dmg`, Windows `.msi`/`.exe`, Linux `.deb`/`.AppImage`, and CLI archives).
| | Read / Extract | Create | Encryption |
|---|:---:|:---:|---|
| ZIP | ✅ | ✅ | AES-256 (read ZipCrypto) |
| 7z | ✅ | ✅ | AES-256 |
| RAR / RAR5 (incl. multi-volume, SFX) | ✅ | — | reads encrypted, incl. encrypted headers |
| tar | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| tar.gz / .bz2 / .xz / .zst / .lz4 | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| gz / bz2 / xz / zst / lz4 (single stream) | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| ISO 9660 / Joliet (disc image) | ✅ | — | — |
> RAR and ISO are extract-only: RAR's compression format is proprietary, and ISO
> is a disc-image container (we read ISO 9660 + Joliet with our own dependency-free
> parser). Everything else can be created as well as read.
## RAR, properly
RAR is the format people *arrive* with — a download split into volumes, packed
solid, sometimes one volume short — so it gets first-class treatment rather than
a checkbox:
- **A volume set is one archive.** `movie.part03.rar`, or the older
`movie.r01`, opens the whole set: any file of the set resolves to the first
volume, the parts are listed, and an entry that spans volumes comes out whole.
Both naming schemes are handled, including the legacy one whose first volume
is `movie.rar` rather than `movie.r01`.
- **A missing volume is named.** Ziplark says *which* file it needs next
instead of failing with a generic error, and refuses to start writing rather
than stopping half-way.
- **Damage is survivable.** `--keep-broken` (in the app: "Extract what's
readable") gets every intact file out of a damaged or incomplete archive and
reports exactly which entries failed and which were written incomplete.
Verifying reports *every* bad entry, so you know which file to re-download.
- **Verifying writes nothing.** Integrity is checked by decompressing each entry
and discarding the bytes — not, as a surprising number of tools do, by
extracting the whole archive to a temporary directory.
- **Metadata survives.** Permissions (an executable stays executable),
100-nanosecond RAR5 timestamps, symlinks as symlinks, per-entry compressed
sizes, solid/recovery-record/lock flags, and the archive comment.
- **Encrypted headers work.** An archive whose *file names* are encrypted
(`rar -hp`) lists and extracts with a password like any other.
- **Self-extracting archives open.** A `.exe` with a RAR payload behind the stub
is read as the archive it is.
- **Pick single files out of it.** `--exact` (and ticking rows in the app)
extracts exactly the entries you name, rather than everything whose path
happens to contain the text.
Ziplark drives libunrar's C API directly — see
[`formats/rar/raw.rs`](crates/ziplark-core/src/formats/rar/raw.rs) for why the
wrapper crates were not enough (multi-volume reads out of bounds there, a failed
entry throws away the archive handle, and the struct layouts do not match the
library's packed headers, which silently mis-reads every field past `file_attr`).
## Why Ziplark
- **Small.** Size-optimized release profile (`opt-level=z`, LTO, stripped,
`panic=abort`). The desktop app uses the OS webview (no bundled Chromium).
- **Faithful.** Permissions, modification times and symlinks survive the round
trip, so an extracted binary still runs and an extracted tree still looks like
the one you archived.
- **Safe.** Every extraction path is funneled through a single guard, and it
checks both ways out: the entry name (`../`, absolute paths) *and* what is
actually on disk, so a symlink — planted by an earlier entry of the same
archive or sitting in the destination already — can't be used to redirect a
write. No entry can escape the destination directory.
- **One engine.** The GUI, CLI and MCP server are thin shells over
[`ziplark-core`](crates/ziplark-core); whatever the CLI does, the app does
identically.
## Repository layout
```
crates/ziplark-core the archive engine (all formats, the security guard)
crates/ziplark-cli the `ziplark` command-line tool
crates/ziplark-mcp the MCP server (drive Ziplark from any LLM)
src-tauri the Tauri 2 desktop app (Rust commands)
ui the desktop frontend (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS)
```
## 1. Desktop app
```bash
# dev run (opens the window)
cargo tauri dev # or: cargo run -p ziplark-gui
# build a release .app + .dmg (macOS), .exe/.msi (Windows), AppImage/deb (Linux)
cargo tauri build
```
Drag an archive onto the window to inspect & extract it, or switch to **Create**
to drag in files/folders, pick a format + compression level (and optional
password), and save.
## 2. CLI — `ziplark`
```bash
cargo build --release -p ziplark-cli # binary at target/release/ziplark
ziplark list movie.rar
ziplark extract photos.zip -o ./out
ziplark create backup.tar.zst ./src ./README.md --level best
ziplark create secret.zip ./private --password hunter2
ziplark test download.7z
ziplark info mystery.bin
```
Every command takes `--json` for scripting. `--include