The program features an archive browser interface with search and history features for intuitive navigation in archive's content, and allows the application of fine-grained multiple exclusion and inclusion filter rules to the archive; a flat browsing mode is possible as alternative archive browsing method. PeaZip allows users to run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. It can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout for speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition. Other notable features of the program include archive conversion, file splitting and joining, secure file deletion, byte-to-byte file comparison, archive encryption, checksum/hash files, find duplicate files, batch renaming, system benchmarking, random passwords/keyfiles generation, view image thumbnails, and integration in the Windows Explorercontext menu. In addition, the program's user interface can be customized. PeaZip is available for IA-32 and x86-64 as natively standalone, portable application and as installable package for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and BSD. It is available also as PortableApps package. Along with more popular and general-purpose archive formats like 7z, Tar, Zip etc., PeaZip supports the PAQ and LPAQ formats. Although usually not recommended for general purpose use, those formats are included for the value as cutting edge compression technology, providing compression ratio amongst the best for most data structures. PeaZip supports encryption with AES 256-bitcipher in 7z, and ZIP archive formats. In PeaZip's native PEA format, and in FreeArc's ARC format, supported ciphers are AES 256-bit, Blowfish, Twofish 256 and Serpent 256. As of version 6.9.2, PeaZip support editing files inside archives. From that version, it also does support adding files to subfolders in an already created archive, in addition to maintaining the characteristic to can add files to archives to the root directory.
Native archive format
PEA, an acronym for Pack Encrypt Authenticate, is an archive file format. It is a general purpose archiving format featuring compression and multiple volume output. The developers' goal is to offer a flexible security model through Authenticated Encryption, that provides both privacy and authentication of the data, and redundant integrity checks ranging from checksums to cryptographically stronghashes, defining three different levels of communication to control: streams, objects, and volumes. It was developed in conjunction with the PeaZip file archiver. PeaZip and Universal Extractor support the PEA archive format.
Third-party technologies
PeaZip acts as a graphical front-end for numerous third-party open source or royalty-free utilities, including:
Igor Pavlov 7z executable and Myspace's p7zip, POSIX port of 7z under Linux
Marcel Lemke UNACEV2.DLL 2.6.0.0 and UNACE for Linux ; being released under a non-OSI compliant license it is available as separate package on PeaZip Add-ons page, as PeaZip UNACE Plugin
Eugene Roshal unrar ; being released under a non-OSI compliant license it is available as separate package on PeaZip Add-ons page, as PeaZip UNRAR5 Plugin. This plugin is optional and only meant to provide an alternative unrar engine, as RAR and RAR5 formats are supported for extraction by PeaZip out of the box.
Most of these utilities can run both in console mode or through a graphical wrapper that allows more user-friendly handling of output information.
Prior to release 5.3, PeaZip installers for Windows and Win64 were bundled with an OpenCandy advertising module, which during installation offered optional installation of recommended third-party software; the official download page provided alternative installers without this module, named 'plain'. From release 5.3 on, PeaZip no longer has ad-supported bundle. PeaZip Portable and PeaZip for Linux packages never featured an ad-supported bundle.
