It will expand files in a large variety of formats, including SIT, ZIP, UU, HQX, GZ, TAR, TAR.GZ, BZ2, ARJ, RAR, & compress. StuffIt Expander is free in cost, but it is not free in license, and the source is definitely closed. Let's hope someone takes up the slack and develops something open for Mac OS X users everywhere. Why nothing for Mac OS X? Because it seems that Aladdin Systems' proprietary StuffIt and StuffIt Expander so dominate the market that there are no open source compression/decompression programs available. But we want an open source alternative, and that's what we're going to get! Fortunately, there are great programs available for Windows and Linux that will meet our needs. There are many commercial, proprietary programs that will do that. More importantly, now that Microsoft has blocked its ubiquitous email program Outlook from receiving any attachments except zipped files in an effort to improve security on that woefully insecure software (See my "Securing Outlook, Part Two: Many Choices to Make," available on SecurityFocus at it is even more important to have software available that will compress and uncompress files and folders easily and efficiently. After all, backups are more easily done with compressed files, especially now that CDs are starting to seem small (Can't you hear it now? "Only 640 MBs?! I can't fit anything on there!"). But it's still an issue for most computer users. In these days of gargantuan hard drives, when a 40-gigabyte drive is considered small, it might seem silly to worry about compressing files and folders. The materials on this page are under a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
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