Total Commander

take archives as a directories is one of TC best feature to me and many people. It simplifies sync file in archives and enable TC powerful quick-search in archives file.

But TC default built-in supported archives type is limited, so we need different packer plugins to operate different kind of archives.

MultiArc plugins give a easy access to add support of new type of archives, though it can't do thing as good as a special plugin focus on a given type of archives. but just put the archives' packing and unpacking exe into the folder, some ini file configuration add support to a type of archives, great!

Multiarc does a good job, but it's 3rd-party and out-of-maintain, not to say its non-unicode support.

So I think it is probably a good idea that TC itself have a MultiArc-like function, it widen the TC's possibility...

Greet.

I wouldn't say MultiArc gives "easy access".

It gives completely obtuse Errors about broken CONSWAIN pipes and others. I'll probably never figure out why some .exe files are browseable (contents) and others are CONSWAIN pipe disasters.

7Zip has never worked consistently for me. Though perhaps that has something to do with the folder name or quotes or something -- but who knows cuz its a CONSWAIN error.

TC's built-in (internal) support for archives is limited. Many interesting features only work if you use the deprecated .zip format. Eg, no matter if you create a solid or non-solid rar folder TC wont allow quickView on a rar to display text files - like it will for zips.

If not for MultiArc I imagine there would of been an outcry for TC's archive handling to be fixed. MultiArc is like batch-files to me: I know the program will abort if it runs across a path/filename that contains unsupported characters (unicode, ampersands, special char, etc).

As is, there's been repeated requests for internal-support for 7z for years now. Always denied. Except there's Multiarc, so that is "good enough".



OT: If you've ever attempted trying to handle special-chars in linux or windows .cmd you'll know what a headache it is. As neither can treat input as a string. Both will attempt to interpret a passed string for possible variable expansion, and will choke if a string from a text file has unexpected (unhandled/escaped) quotes. Then there's escaping escapes and escaping the escaped escapes -- easier to just skip it and expect the whole thing to fail periodically. Or use a scripting language that treats strings as actual strings.