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7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z introduced in 2001, but can read and write several others.
The program can be used from a Windows graphical user interface that also features shell integration, or from a command-line interface as the command 7z that offers cross-platform support (see versions for details). An obsolete port of 7-Zip to POSIX systems was called p7zip. Most of the 7-Zip source code is under the LGPL-2.1-or-later license; the unRAR code, however, is under the LGPL-2.1-or-later license with an "unRAR restriction", which states that developers are not permitted to use the code to reverse-engineer the RAR compression algorithm.
Since version 21.01 alpha, Linux support has been added to the 7zip project. (Full article...)