Bragueta

Look before you extract.

Opening an archive to browse it is instant, whatever its size: Bragueta reads the index without decompressing anything. Pick one file out of ten thousand and only that file comes out.

The extension is a convention, not a fact. Bragueta reads the bytes.

It will tell you a file is a 7z archive even when it is named holiday.jpg. It also recognises far more formats than it can open, because “this is a StuffIt archive and I cannot open it” is a useful answer and “unknown format” is not.

Self-extracting .exe files open too

Somebody sends you a Windows installer. Your Mac cannot run it, so the file is dead weight — but the archive inside is intact. Bragueta finds it and opens it.

It tells you what an archive would do.

Before writing a single byte, Bragueta checks the archive for five things. Anything dangerous is listed, explained, and left alone unless you decide otherwise.

• Entries that escape the folder you choseDangerous

  A path that climbs out of the destination and writes somewhere else on your Mac.

• Symbolic links pointing somewhere else on your diskDangerous

  A link inside the archive that quietly aims at a folder you never chose.

• Decompression bombsDangerous

  A small file that unpacks into enough data to fill the disk it lands on.

• Names disguised with invisible charactersConfusing

  Characters you cannot see, arranged so a file reads as something it is not.

• Files that would collide with each other on macOSConfusing

  Two entries the archive keeps apart that your Mac would merge into one.

Everything you are likely to be sent.

Create and open

Open

RAR archives open fine, including encrypted and multi-volume ones. Installer packages like PKG and DEB open to show what they would install, not their inner plumbing.

Convert, compare, inspect.

Turn a RAR into a 7z with one button. Free space is checked before starting, the scratch space is always cleaned up, and if the original is encrypted and the destination cannot hold a password you are told before anything is written.

Compare two archives without extracting either — it works from the stored checksums, so nothing is decompressed. And see what an archive is made of, by file type: if it is ninety percent JPEG, compressing it harder gains nothing, and Bragueta says so before you wait twenty minutes to find out.

Real encryption

AES-256 for 7z archives, with the option to encrypt the file names as well — so that without the password, not even the list of contents can be read.

Checksums and hashes, seventeen of them.

CRC-32, CRC-64, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, SHA3, BLAKE2 and more — for a loose file, for an archive, or for every file inside one. Paste the value somebody gave you and the matching row turns green; you do not have to know which algorithm it came from.

Every value says what it actually guarantees. A CRC catches a file damaged in transit and proves nothing against someone who changed it on purpose, and that warning is printed in the exported report too, not just on screen. Export to plain text, to Markdown, or to the format shasum -c verifies on any Mac or Linux machine.

Made for macOS.

• Quick Look preview: press the space bar on an archive and see what’s inside
• A Finder menu for compressing and extracting without opening the app
• Shortcuts actions, to put archives into your automations
• Names in Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic or emoji survive intact, in both directions
• English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese

What’s free and what you pay for.

Nobody is ever left unable to open their own files, and charging to warn you about a dangerous archive would be indecent.