The original motivation behind this project was to create an easy, convenient way to extract files from various types of installation packages without the need to remember arcane command line switches or track down separate utilities to handle the unpacking. What it will do, however, is allow you to extract files from virtually any type of archive, regardless of source, file format, compression method, etc. It cannot (and never will) create archives, and therefore cannot fully replace archivers such as 7-Zip or WinRAR. Please note that Universal Extractor is not intended to be a general purpose archiving program.

It's able to support so many varied file formats by utilizing the many backend utilities listed in the credits at the bottom of the page. The full list of supported formats can be found in the table below. Universal Extractor is a program designed to decompress and extract files from any type of archive or installer, such as ZIP or RAR files, self-extracting EXE files, application installers, etc.

This has become the main point of discussion for this project. If you have any questions about, or find any problems with, Universal Extractor, please post your comments to the UniExtract subforum on the MSFN message board. Skip to: Download/Screenshots | Installation and Usage | Technical Details | Supported Formats | Credits Introduction I've not used it myself, but if you're having trouble with the official version or not able to get it to extract newer formats and executables, I'd recommend giving Bioruebe's version a try. I'm not affiliated with the project in any way, but it seems to be a nice continuation of the project in the original open source spirit as my own creation.

That said, I recently discovered a project calling itself Universal Extractor 2. There have been a lot of unofficial forks and continuations released, and while I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm, most of those have been closed source updates that I wouldn't recommend. It's not exactly abandoned, but since I no longer run Windows it's not something I have much of a need for these days. Note: Development on the 'official' version of Universal Extractor has stopped.

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