WinRK

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WinRK is a commercial file archiver program for Microsoft Windows. It is produced by the "M Software" company, which is located in New Zealand and which consists of a single person, Malcolm Taylor.

WinRK supports its own proprietary RK archive format and additionally the popular ZIP, gzip, bzip2, tar, RAR, and ISO file formats. The program's ZIP support is compatible with the AES encryption scheme used by the latest WinZIP versions, and with the newer Zip64 standard. This support allows for both big archive file sizes (over 4 GiB) and strong file encryption. WinRK comes with an extensive GUI, considered as very easy to use by some people, but unergonomic by other people.

Later versions of WinRK provide a DLL-based plugin API, allowing developers to extend WinRK to support alternate archive formats and compression schemes.

Reviews done by maximumcompression.com show WinRK delivers one of the highest compression-ratios of programs in its class. This comes with a price of being a very slow archiver. Also, it suffers from some major bugs^{[citation needed]} and has stability problems. Finally, it lacks a freeware extraction utility (RAR for example provides such for many systems), though it is capable of producing self-extracting archives (Windows only, might cause problems at older (non-NT) versions). This is why archivers such as WinZIP, WinRAR and the open source 7-zip enjoy greater popularity.

"WinRK provides a simple but powerful script language to enable batch processing. The script can be accessed directly from the command line, or through a text script file."

(from WinRK help file)

However, it should be noted that even when executed from the command line, WinRK still pops up a GUI window showing the main interface and the process' progress bars. Most other archivers, such as PKZIP, WinZip, PowerArchiver, etc., require an additional download and installation (and additional cost for WinZIP) to provide this functionality aside from the GUI, and 7-ZIP offers besides the GUI version alternative command line versions for many systems.