Diffoniq can open archives directly, without the help of an external archive utility. An archive behaves like a folder: it can be compared against a directory, against another archive, or appear inside a recursive directory comparison. The following archive types are recognized by their file extension:
| ZIP | .zip .jar |
| 7-Zip | .7z |
| RAR | .rar |
| tar | .tar, compressed: .tar.gz/.tgz,
.tar.bz2/.tbz/.tbz2,
.tar.xz/.txz,
.tar.zst/.tzst |
| Windows | .cab .iso |
Renamed archives. A file whose extension is not in the
table is still recognized as an archive when its content identifies it as one
— for example a ZIP renamed to data.bak. Diffoniq checks the
file’s first bytes for the known archive signatures and, on a match,
treats the file like an archive of that type. Office and OpenDocument files
(.docx, .xlsx, .odt, …), which are
technically ZIP containers, are deliberately excluded and keep behaving as
plain files.
Nested archives. An archive stored inside another archive
(for example a .zip inside a .zip, or a
.tar.gz inside a .zip) behaves like a subfolder:
open it the same way you open a folder — double-click its row or press
Enter — and Diffoniq lists its contents so you can compare
them too. This works to any depth and across formats; the header shows the full
path, such as outer.zip\inner.zip\readme.txt. The inner archive is
expanded only when you open it, so browsing a large archive stays fast.
A damaged or truncated archive is not rejected outright: Diffoniq falls back to a forward-only scan and still lists every entry whose local data is intact.
Timestamp note: many archive formats store file times with a 2-second resolution (a DOS/ZIP heritage), so an archive entry’s time can differ from the on-disk file’s time by a second. When comparing an archive against a directory, enable Ignore Time to avoid such spurious time differences — content comparison is not affected.