HatchZip is a free, open-source archive extractor for Windows, macOS and Linux, with a desktop app and a command line tool. It extracts ZIP, 7z, RAR, tar and split archives in place, for when there is not enough disk space to extract an archive next to itself, such as a large game download on a nearly full disk. Download it from hatchzip.dev.
A 180 GB game download that unpacks to 200 GB needs 380 GB of disk with WinRAR, 7-Zip or unzip, because the archive and everything extracted from it have to exist at the same time. HatchZip needs a little over 200 GB. It extracts the archive from the end and cuts each finished part off the archive file as it goes, so the space the archive gives back is reused for the next files.
It checks that the extraction will fit before it changes anything, keeps a safety margin of free space the whole way through, and can be stopped or crash at any moment and pick up where it left off. It reads ZIP, 7z, tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, RAR volume sets and split archives.
Get it
[!IMPORTANT]
HatchZip is only distributed from this repository's releases and its site, hatchzip.dev. Other sites using the name, such as hatchzip.com, are not affiliated with this project.
No coding needed. Download for Windows (Windows 10 and 11), or for macOS (Apple Silicon), macOS (Intel) and Linux.
- Run the installer. Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" because HatchZip is not code-signed yet: choose More info, then Run anyway.
- Right-click the archive, choose HatchZip, then Extract here. On Windows 11 the menu is under Show more options. To pick the destination folder first, choose Extract files… instead.
- Or open HatchZip from the Start menu, open the archive, and choose Extract.
HatchZip shows whether the files will fit before it changes anything. The archive is used up as the files come out, so when it finishes, only the extracted files are left.
Extract here puts an archive with one folder or one file at its top next to the archive. An archive with several files or folders at its top goes into a new folder named after it, so its files never mix with what is already there. The progress window closes when the extraction completes; to keep it open, clear Close the progress window when extraction completes in the app's Settings menu.
To keep the archive when there is room for both, choose Extract here (keep archive) in the right-click menu. To always keep archives, as other extractors do, clear Remove the archive during extraction in the app's Settings menu; every right-click entry then keeps the archive too. That is a normal extraction: the archive is not changed, and space is required for all extracted files.
When there is not enough disk space to extract
The same 200 MB of game data (21 files), packed by the real tools, extracted on a 220 MiB disk with about 50 MB free:
| Archive | unzip / 7-Zip | HatchZip |
|---|
| ZIP, 180 MB | unzip ran out of space at file 6 of 21 | Finished, every file byte-identical |
7z from 7-Zip 25.01, -ms=20m (10 solid blocks) | Needs 380 MB | Finished in 0.64 s, every file byte-identical |
| 7z split into 5 volumes of 40 MB | Needs 380 MB | Finished; volumes deleted one at a time, peak 210 MB used |
| tar from GNU tar, 200 MB | Needs 400 MB | Finished in 0.12 s, every file byte-identical |
| 7z from 7-Zip with default settings (1 solid block) | Needs 380 MB | Refused before touching anything: one solid block can't be freed until all of it is out, so it needs 200 MB free |
| Result |
|---|
| ZIP extraction speed, same data | 0.25 to 0.35 s, against 1.48 to 1.50 s for unzip 6.00, including an fsync unzip skips |
| Crash safety | Killed at both unsafe moments of a batch at many points of each format's run; every resume finished with identical output |
| Works on | Any filesystem that can shrink a file: ext4, btrfs, XFS, NTFS, APFS, and also exFAT and FAT32 USB drives |
Measured on Fedora 43, Intel Core i7-14700HX, SK Hynix NVMe SSD, warm page cache; the disk-space runs used a 220 MiB tmpfs to stand in for a full laptop disk, the speed runs ext4. Speed comes from decompressing files in parallel, so an archive holding one giant file extracts at the speed of a single core.
The extra space HatchZip needs beyond the output is about the size of the largest single unit it can free at once: one file for ZIP and tar, one solid block for 7z. On filesystems that can punch holes (ext4, XFS, btrfs, tmpfs; NTFS and APFS not yet verified), a large file stored or deflated in a ZIP, or in a tar, frees its archive bytes every 256 MiB while it is extracted: a ZIP holding one 600 MiB stored file extracted on a 950 MiB tmpfs with 367 MB free, where it needed 629 MB before. hatchzip check computes the exact figure for any archive.
Installation
Desktop app
Download from the latest release:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
