On install you get the chance to add support for ACE, KGB, PEA and Stuffit archives as well as adding right click context menus and Send To/Desktop/Quick launch icons. Many extraction tasks will be trouble free, it’s just if you encounter a newer or unsupported format potential issues might arise. While outdated, the program still functions quite well and it’s supported formats list is still impressive. Newer archive formats like RAR5 or ZIPX are not supported out of the box and you will receive an error trying to extract them. Although compatibility is still good for the program itself, no updates in over four years does mean many third party utilities and the file format identifier are out of date as well. The sad thing about the original Universal Extractor program is it hasn’t been updated since 2010 and no more updates look likely. There are several unofficial versions of Universal Extractor on the internet, here we’ll show you what the original and the most popular unofficial build offers. For example, if the file is a RAR archive, the UnRar.exe command line tool will be called to extract it, and so on. If the format is supported by Universal Extractor, it will call on a third party tool from its BIN folder to extract the file. Universal extractor works by first scanning and identifying what type of file you have asked it to unpack using the TrID file identifier tool which can identify over 5,000 different file types. The program itself is a front end created in the AutoIt scripting language which calls upon a wealth of other free and open source utilities to perform the identifying and extracting of files. Universal Extractor cannot create archives though, it merely recognizes and unpacks them, so it certainly doesn’t make your current archiver redundant. This doesn’t matter if it’s a common archive format (ZIP, RAR), an obscure archive format (KGB, SIT), an executable setup installer package, disc images, compressed help files or web pages, office formats, or even compressed mail archives. Universal Extractor is a tool that’s been around for a number of years and does what the name suggests identify almost any type of file and if it’s a compressed package, Universal Extractor will try to unpack it.

Portable winrar