install

Additional install commands

macOS

Homebrewverified · 100%

brew install libarchive

provider-native install command

overview

Package summary

Multi-format archive and compression library

Project links

Homepage

Commands and aliases

bsdcat
bsdcpio
bsdtar
bsdunzip

history

Project history and usage

libarchive is a portable C library and command-line tool suite for reading and writing many archive formats. It ships bsdtar, bsdcpio, bsdcat, and bsdunzip, making it both a developer library and a practical Unix toolbox package.

Project history

The project began in the FreeBSD orbit and was first released in 2006, according to its own libarchive 3.0 transition notes. Its design emphasized streaming, automatic format detection, and a single API that could handle tar, cpio, zip, ISO images, compression filters, and later many more formats.

Adoption history

libarchive spread widely because packaging systems, installers, build tools, and OS utilities all need to unpack archives without shelling out to a pile of format-specific programs. Its bsdtar and bsdcpio utilities became FreeBSD-associated alternatives to GNU tar and cpio, while the library itself was packaged across Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows-oriented environments.

How it is used

Applications link libarchive to read and write archives through one API, while users run bsdtar, bsdcpio, bsdcat, or bsdunzip. The project site emphasizes automatic handling of archive-plus-compression combinations such as tar.gz and support for POSIX-like systems plus Windows.

Why package nerds care

libarchive is one of those packages that quietly makes package managers work. Its importance is in boring reliability: many archive formats, many platforms, a test suite, and CLI tools that can replace multiple single-format utilities.

Timeline

2006: libarchive was first released.
2011-12: libarchive 3.0 was released after nearly two years of development since 2.8.
2016-04-30: libarchive 3.2.0 added bsdcat, LZ4, WARC, raw writer, and ZIP64-related features.
2018-09-03: libarchive 3.3.3 included Zstandard read and write filters.
2023-07-14: the project recorded a bsdunzip port from FreeBSD in NEWS.

Related projects

Related projects include FreeBSD tar and cpio tooling, GNU tar, Info-ZIP, zlib, bzip2, xz, lz4, zstd, archive-consuming package managers, and installers.

Sources

security posture

Risk level: green

library-like package without higher-risk signals.

Risk classifier

green risk · low confidence · appliance

Why

library-like package without higher-risk signals

Signals

metadata:library-like

Install behavior

No Homebrew bottle metadata was recorded.

Recommended review

Before unattended agent use, check whether the tool reads plaintext credentials, writes remote state, publishes artifacts, or shells out to plugins.

executables

Installed executables

Command	Kind	Exposure	Note
`bsdcat`	executable	indexed executable	Discovered from the local executable index.
`bsdcpio`	executable	indexed executable	Discovered from the local executable index.
`bsdtar`	executable	indexed executable	Discovered from the local executable index.
`bsdunzip`	executable	indexed executable	Discovered from the local executable index.

freshness

Version and freshness

These signals separate page generation age, package-manager activity, and upstream release comparison. Version lag is warned only when an evidence URL and comparable versions are present.

page generated2026-08-03

manager version3.8.9

manager updated

local dataunknown

upstreamnot available

latest detectednot detected

okNo freshness warnings were generated.

install metadata

Package metadata

Package key	brew:libarchive
Version	3.8.9
Package manager	Homebrew
Homepage	https://www.libarchive.org
Bottle	not recorded
Service	none declared

package graph

Links come from deterministic package relationships, av.db category and tag curation, ecosystem matches, and package hub membership.

source trail

Generated from repository data

This page is generated by av-web from the private package SQLite artifact built by scripts/generate-pkg-sqlite.py.

Combined YAML source

View the package source record on GitHub.

combined/libarchive.yml

Used sources

Geiger risk classifier
Nucleus package database
curated package history
pkgdb category and tag curation

Install libarchive with Homebrew