What ZIP compression method do common OS's natively support?
7-zip gives me 5 options for the compression method to zip files with:
- Deflate
- Deflate64
- LZMA
- BZip2
- PPMd
On my Windows 8 machine, the built-in Windows Explorer utility appears to handle LZMA with no problem can list the files in an LZMA-compressed file with no problem...but not actually read them. I know Deflate is the most compatible, but for some files I'm attempting to distribute, the maximum setting results in a file that's 2x larger than the LZMA-compressed file. However, because the people I'm distributing it to have whatever OS, I need a widely-supported format.
What compression methods to the native zip utilities on Windows 7, 8, and Mac OS X support?
If your primary goal is compatibility with all/most OSs and unzipping tools, then Deflate is your best choice.
From Wikipedia's Zip->Compression Methods article:
The most commonly used compression method is DEFLATE, which is described in IETF RFC 1951.
Since no one has answered the actual question yet:
What compression methods to the native zip utilities on Windows 7, 8, and Mac OS X support?
- Windows 7+ supports Deflate and Deflate64.
- macOS only supports Deflate.
Any OS with python 3.3 or above and the zipfile, zlib, bz2 & lzma modules can unpack zip files using Deflate, Deflate64, BZip2 and LZMA compression methods using the zipfile command line interface, e.g.
python3 -m zipfile -e example.zip .
Recent versions of macOS and many (most?) Linux distros fulfil this criteria.