Extracting 7z Files in Linux

You don’t always get to control what types of compression programs people use which lead to multiple types of files to deal with. 7zip files noted by their extention, 7z are compression files that use an open source algorithm that tends to have a higher compression ratio than others. Unfortunately, it is a fairly uncommon type of compression and default Linux distros often times don’t come with a program to deal with such files. Here I show you the tool you need and how to extract these compressed files.

Download

The first thing you will need to do is download the p7zip program.
Ubuntu users can do this by typing the following command:

sudo apt-get install p7zip

Extracting

To extract the file just type:

p7zip -d filename.7z

If you are using gnome you should also be able to right click on the file and select extract here.

7zip files have great compression ratios and often times offer higher compression than RAR, ZIP and other formats. Enjoy!