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star_zip is a free, lightweight archiver for Windows, published by psb140306 and built with C# and WPF on .NET 8. Designed as a fast alternative within the file compression and archive management category, it can create ZIP, TAR, GZ, and TAR.GZ archives, and it extracts those formats as well as 7z, RAR, TAR.BZ2, and the Korean ALZ and EGG formats. This makes it suitable for everyday compression tasks, unpacking downloads, and handling Korean-language archives, where legacy CP949-encoded file names are detected and recovered automatically. Password-protected archives are supported, with a prompt that appears only when an item actually being extracted is encrypted. The interface follows the Windows 11 Fluent design, offering ribbon tabs, a folder tree with breadcrumbs, in-archive search, drag and drop, light and dark themes, and optional Explorer context menu integration, so the tool fits both mouse-driven and keyboard-driven workflows. Double-clicking a text or image entry previews it in place rather than extracting it first, which is useful for quickly inspecting archive contents. Safety is a core design principle: existing files are preserved unless the user explicitly chooses to overwrite them, every extraction path is validated against directory traversal (Zip Slip) attacks, alternate data streams, and reserved device names, and the Mark-of-the-Web from a downloaded archive is propagated to the files extracted from it. For automation and scripting scenarios, a command line tool named starzip is bundled in the cli folder, allowing the same archiving and extraction capabilities to be used outside the graphical interface. The current release is version 1.5.0, and the catalog lists one version in total. Overall, star_zip targets Windows users who need a compact, secure, and modern archiving utility with strong support for Korean archive formats and safe extraction defaults.
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