Have you ever downloaded some data off the ‘net only to find it’s in a compressed or archive file format that your PC doesn’t have a helper app for? Or you’re fixing up a friend’s PC, you download some drivers and ditto, you can’t get them unpacked?
If so, you’ll be interested in WobZIP. It’s a web site where you can upload an archive file and it will uncompress it for you. Once uncompressed, you can either download the files one by one, or else the site will bundle the files back up into a zip archive for you to download.
The site is still in beta but claims to support the following archive formats – 7z, zip, gzip, bzip2, tar, rar, cab, iso, arj, lzh, chm, z, cpio, rpm, deb and nsis. Obviously quite a few of those formats are Unix and Linux, but there’s a fair collection of DOS / Windows ones too. As it’s a website, it doesn’t care what OS you’re running either. From the FAQ, WobZIP uses the open source 7-zip program as the decompression engine.
Cleverly, there’s also a feature to unpack or uncompress from a URL so you don’t always have to download to your PC and then upload back to WobZIP – you can just enter the URL and it will go and get the file for you. Also, it will scan the unpacked files for viruses.
Put this site in your bookmarks. You may not need it right now, but you will one day.