Ark

Ark is the archive manager of the KDE desktop. It opens a compressed archive into a file-list view where the contents can be browsed as a tree, individual entries previewed or opened in their usual application, and a selection extracted without unpacking everything. Files and folders can also be added to or removed from an existing archive.

Format support comes from external libraries and command-line tools rather than from Ark itself, so the list of formats it can read depends on what is installed alongside it. The usual set covers tar with gzip, bzip2, xz or zstd compression, zip, and 7z. RAR archives require the separate unrar or rar programs, which are not free software and are packaged apart from Ark by most distributions.

Ark integrates with Dolphin, adding compress and extract entries to the file manager context menu, and it can be driven from the command line to create or unpack an archive in a single step. Archives can be protected with a password, and for the formats that allow it the file list itself can be encrypted as well as the file contents.