[illjazz]

I normally use the Unarchiver (http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html) and recommend it to every Mac user I know. It's very simple and in 95% of cases, is just what I need. But I just ran into an instance where I'm dealing with a pretty large RAR archive (about 9GB) and I want to extract it, but I want the extracted content in a different location then where the archive is located now.. without first having to move the archive. That kind of scenario is way past Unarchiver's abilities, but then that's not Unarchiver's OR OS X's built-in archive handling system's place either. Which compression utility could give me this kind of level of control?

I've been a Mac user since December 2008 and just bought one of those shiny new MBP's a month ago. It's the best laptop I've ever had. But I've never seen a compression utility on OS X as solid as WinRAR for Windoze.

TIA.

[mdawson]

Smith Micro's Stuffit Deluxe has been the staple file compressor for Macs almost as long as there have been Macs. Longtime Mac users such as myself are long accustomed to seeing .sit (Stuffit) and .sea (self-extracting archive) files. Stuffit has long been used by many Mac-centric software developers for software distribution even before the Web explosion of the late-1990s. So much so in fact that Apple pre-installed the free Stuffit Expander utility on all Macs for several years until OS X's built-in archive extraction capabilities nullified the need for most people.

About the time Apple introduced OS X, or perhaps just before, Stuffit expanded beyond its base proprietary archival format and began handling .zip files and even went cross-platform. Since OS X became the default operating system for Macs with its UNIX underpinnings, Stuffit has grown to support just about every compression format you can think of.

[grimlosh]

Some com pressed files seem to work with some compression tools but not with others despite the fact the utility "says" it will do the job.

Some programs I have found that will work at joining or compressing / uncompressing files...

MacPAR deLuxe
Split and Concat 2.5
UnRarX
EZ 7z
Stufit / Drop Stuff