W-Shadow.com

Recently I ran into a situation where I needed to convert some relatively obscure archive files (e.g. RAR) to the ZIP format. That’s easy enough if you only need to deal with a single file – just extract it using your favorite archiver and re-compress the extracted files as .zip.

However, manually converting dozens of files would take forever, not to mention how excrutiatingly tiresome it would be. So I wrote a Windows batch file that can convert any number of archives to ZIP using the open-source archiver 7-Zip. I’m posting the converter here in case anyone finds it useful.

Features

• Converts (almost) any archive format to ZIP.
• Supports wildcards.
• You can set the output directory for the converted files. By default they’re created in the current directory.
• Compatible with Windows XP and up.
• Supported filetypes* : 7z, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

* I didn’t actually test all of these formats, but most should work.

Download

zipconv.bat (2 KB)

Standard disclaimers apply. The software is provided as-is, don’t blame me if it kills your system, and so on. Also, don’t forget to download and install 7-Zip before using the batch file.

Usage

The converter should be run from the command line. If you’re not familiar with using the command prompt you can find some basic tutorials here.

General syntax
zipconv {input_filename} [output_directory]

The batch file takes up to two command line arguments. The first argument must be the name of the file to be converted. For example, this could be “oldarchive.arj” or “c:\backup\oldarchive.arj” if the file is not in the current directory. You can also use wildcards to convert multiple files in one go.

The second argument specifies the directory where to put the converted files. Setting it is optional – the converter will use the current directory by default. If you do set the output directory, don’t forget to include the final backslash in the directory name or the converter will make a mess.

Examples

• Convert “somefile.rar” that is located in the current directory to “somefile.zip” :
  zipconv somefile.rar
• Convert all CAB files from the current directory to ZIP :
  zipconv *.cab
• Convert all RAR files to ZIP and put the converted files in a subdirectory “converted_files” (this directory wil be created if it doesn’t exist) :
  zipconv *.rar ".\converted_files\"

Good luck