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Supported platforms

We currently support the following platforms:

Cross platform archive considerations​

If you are wanting to extract an archive created on another platform there are a few edge cases to keep in mind.

Case sensitive file systems​

Some platforms have case sensitive filesystems allowing two items in the same directory to share a name with different cases. For example: Notes.txt and notes.txt are two distinct files.

When trying to extract these files onto a system with a case insensitive file system Notes.txt and notes.txt refer to the same file.

Default behaviour​

When extracting an archive on Windows we make use of FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS, which gives us case sensitivity if the system feature is enabled.

This feature is controlled via HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsEnableDirCaseSensitivity registry key (1 is enabled).

If disabled archive extract will only write one of the files, it's not deterministic which one.

tip

Typically this feature is enabled when WSL is installed

warning

While this feature will allow archive extract to write files with matching names that only differ by case it won't mean all programs will behave correctly when you try to interact with them

Patterns​

One option to solve this is the use of include or exclude patterns to select the one you want extracted.

Tar​

The tar format is case sensitive meaning you can extract the archive into a tar using the --tar option. Then browse the tar and extract the files you are interested in.

tip

7Zip supports reading tar's on Windows

Enable case sensitivity​

If you are on Windows it is possible to make the filesystem behave in a case sensitive manner, via system setting changes.

Windows has two types of symlinks one for files and one for directories.

This presents problems when extracting symlinks on Windows from an archive created on other platforms. Since it's not always obvious what type of symlink should be created at the time of extraction.

Due to this we always extract symlinks from other platforms as file symlinks on Windows.

note

We believe this won't typically be an issue as most cross platform archive extractions are typically data recovery related, so links are less important. If you have a need for this to work seamlessly don't hesitate to let us know your use case via the contact page