Open Source Archive Utility?
With most operating systems these days, you get a file management utility capable of creating and extracting some archive formats. That is okay for most, but not for intermediate to power users. They often find the modern incarnations of Windows Explorer, Finder (OS X), and Nautilus (Linux) to be, well, let us just say it: pathetic!
Such hide more than they show you and show you less with every new version. When it comes to archive formats, anything outside of the top 5% of popular usually choke them or show more of their inadequacies.
We cannot offer much as yet about the file management problem in a cross platform and open source solution. For the archive problem, there is a potential solution, since someone wrote to use and asked…
PeaZip is not only a front end GUI for common command line archive utilities, it can also open and extract over 150 different archive formats, either natively (for some) or through those free support command line utilities. It is not available in OS X, but everyone else can give it try. No more frustrations with formats, subformats, etc. PeaZip also opens up our new “Utilities” section under “Resources (for Authors).” There are more to come therein into the future.