Ziplark

Install

# macOS — Homebrew
brew install --cask zhitongblog/tap/ziplark   # desktop app
brew install zhitongblog/tap/ziplark          # CLI + MCP (ziplark, ziplark-mcp)

# Windows — Scoop (CLI + MCP)
scoop bucket add ziplark https://github.com/zhitongblog/scoop-bucket
scoop install ziplark

Or grab a build for any platform from the releases page (macOS .dmg, Windows .msi/.exe, Linux .deb/.AppImage, and CLI archives).

RAR, ISO, DEB/AR, RPM/CPIO and CAB are read/extract/preview formats — all parsed in memory-safe Rust (except RAR, which uses the official UnRAR C++ library). ZIP, 7z and tar variants support full creation and in-place append (ziplark add).

RAR, properly

RAR is the format people arrive with — a download split into volumes, packed solid, sometimes one volume short — so it gets first-class treatment rather than a checkbox:

• A volume set is one archive. movie.part03.rar, or the older movie.r01, opens the whole set: any file of the set resolves to the first volume, the parts are listed, and an entry that spans volumes comes out whole. Both naming schemes are handled, including the legacy one whose first volume is movie.rar rather than movie.r01.
• A missing volume is named. Ziplark says which file it needs next instead of failing with a generic error, and refuses to start writing rather than stopping half-way.
• Damage is survivable. --keep-broken (in the app: "Extract what's readable") gets every intact file out of a damaged or incomplete archive and reports exactly which entries failed and which were written incomplete. Verifying reports every bad entry, so you know which file to re-download.
• Verifying writes nothing. Integrity is checked by decompressing each entry and discarding the bytes — not, as a surprising number of tools do, by extracting the whole archive to a temporary directory.
• Metadata survives. Permissions (an executable stays executable), 100-nanosecond RAR5 timestamps, symlinks as symlinks, per-entry compressed sizes, solid/recovery-record/lock flags, and the archive comment.
• Encrypted headers work. An archive whose file names are encrypted (rar -hp) lists and extracts with a password like any other.
• Self-extracting archives open. A .exe with a RAR payload behind the stub is read as the archive it is.
• Pick single files out of it. --exact (and ticking rows in the app) extracts exactly the entries you name, rather than everything whose path happens to contain the text.

Ziplark drives libunrar's C API directly — see formats/rar/raw.rs for why the wrapper crates were not enough (multi-volume reads out of bounds there, a failed entry throws away the archive handle, and the struct layouts do not match the library's packed headers, which silently mis-reads every field past file_attr).

Why Ziplark

• Small. Size-optimized release profile (opt-level=z, LTO, stripped, panic=abort). The desktop app uses the OS webview (no bundled Chromium).
• Faithful. Permissions, modification times and symlinks survive the round trip, so an extracted binary still runs and an extracted tree still looks like the one you archived.
• Safe. Every extraction path is funneled through a single guard, and it checks both ways out: the entry name (../, absolute paths) and what is actually on disk, so a symlink — planted by an earlier entry of the same archive or sitting in the destination already — can't be used to redirect a write. No entry can escape the destination directory.
• One engine. The GUI, CLI and MCP server are thin shells over ziplark-core; whatever the CLI does, the app does identically.

Repository layout

crates/ziplark-core   the archive engine (all formats, the security guard)
crates/ziplark-cli    the `ziplark` command-line tool
crates/ziplark-mcp    the MCP server (drive Ziplark from any LLM)
src-tauri           the Tauri 2 desktop app (Rust commands)
ui                  the desktop frontend (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS)

1. Desktop app

# dev run (opens the window)
cargo tauri dev            # or: cargo run -p ziplark-gui

# build a release .app + .dmg (macOS), .exe/.msi (Windows), AppImage/deb (Linux)
cargo tauri build

Drag an archive onto the window to inspect & extract it, or switch to Create to drag in files/folders, pick a format + compression level (and optional password), and save.

2. CLI — ziplark

cargo build --release -p ziplark-cli      # binary at target/release/ziplark

ziplark list    movie.rar
ziplark cat     repo.tar.gz src/main.rs
ziplark grep    "TODO" repo.tar.gz -i --include "*.rs"
ziplark extract photos.zip -o ./out --smart
ziplark create  backup.tar.zst ./src ./README.md --level best
ziplark add     backup.tar.zst ./CHANGELOG.md
ziplark rm      backup.tar.zst CHANGELOG.md --exact
ziplark convert legacy.rar clean.tar.zst --level best
ziplark create  secret.zip ./private --password hunter2
ziplark test    download.7z
ziplark info    mystery.bin

Every command takes --json for scripting. --include <PAT> filters entries on extract; --smart avoids tarbombs and double-nesting; --level store|fast|default|best and --password apply to create/add.

Right-click (file-manager) integration

Add Extract here with Ziplark and Compress to ZIP with Ziplark to your OS file manager's context menu:

ziplark shell-integration install      # enable
ziplark shell-integration status       # show what's installed
ziplark shell-integration uninstall    # remove

Per platform: macOS installs two Automator Quick Actions (Finder → right-click → Quick Actions); Windows adds per-user (HKCU, no admin) shell verbs on archive file types and on files/folders; Linux installs KDE service menus and Nautilus scripts. Every entry just calls the ziplark CLI (extract-here / compress-zip), so it follows wherever the binary lives. Both helper commands are also usable directly:

ziplark extract-here movie.zip         # → ./movie/ next to the archive
ziplark compress-zip ./photos ./a.txt  # → ./Archive.zip next to them

3. MCP server — ziplark-mcp

A Model Context Protocol server (JSON-RPC over stdio). Read tools (ziplark_info, ziplark_list, ziplark_read, ziplark_grep, ziplark_test) are always available; the write tools (ziplark_extract, ziplark_create, ziplark_add, ziplark_remove, ziplark_convert) require --allow-write.

cargo build --release -p ziplark-mcp

Or install the MCP Bundle — ziplark-mcp-<version>.mcpb on the releases page, one file carrying the server for macOS, Windows and Linux. Ziplark is listed in the official MCP registry as io.github.zhitongblog/ziplark, so clients that read the registry can find it on their own.

Register it with an MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ziplark": {
      "command": "/path/to/target/release/ziplark-mcp",
      "args": ["--allow-write"]
    }
  }
}

Big archives don't flood the context

ziplark_list is paged. It returns at most limit entries (default 200) starting at offset, always alongside the archive's true total_entries, so listing a 200 000-entry disc image costs the same as listing a small ZIP:

{ "name": "ziplark_list", "arguments": { "path": "disc.iso", "limit": 200 } }
// -> { "total_entries": 203411, "returned": 200, "next_offset": 200,
//      "truncated": true, "top_level": [ { "prefix": "usr/share", "entries": 88120 }, … ] }

When the result is truncated it also carries top_level — entry counts grouped by directory, descending past a single root — so a client can see the shape of a huge archive without paging through it. To go straight to what you want, filter instead of paging: include takes path patterns, matched as globs when they contain * or ? and as substrings otherwise, and applies before paging. dirs selects only files or only directories.

{ "name": "ziplark_list",
  "arguments": { "path": "disc.iso", "include": ["*/etc/*.conf"], "dirs": false } }

Building & testing

cargo test                 # engine round-trip + security tests
cargo build --release      # all crates, size-optimized

License

MIT © 2026 doaipm — a doaipm.com project. See LICENSE.

Ziplark bundles third-party open-source components under their own licenses, acknowledged in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md. Note in particular that RAR extraction uses the UnRAR library, which is under the UnRAR license (not MIT) and may not be used to re-create the RAR compression algorithm.