How to Decompress a Mac File With StuffIt

Your Mac comes with a freeware utility called StuffIt Expander (requiring System 6.0.5 or later OS). With StuffIt, you can decompress just about any compressed Mac file you find on the Internet.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Mac OS 9.0
• StuffIt Expander (Mac) (Aladdin Systems)

1. Drop the icon of the file you want to expand onto the StuffIt Expander icon, which looks like a grinder that takes in archives and grinds out files and folders. StuffIt Expander automatically decompresses the file.
2. Hold down the Control key while dropping the archives onto the icon and StuffIt Expander will delete the original archives after expanding them.

Tips & Warnings

• StuffIt Expander can restore to full size any StuffIt archive (.sit), Compact Pro archive (.cpt), BinHex archive (.hqx) or MacBinary archive (.bin).
• DropStuff with Expander Enhancer, another Aladdin utility, expands files that were compressed or encoded on PCs and on Unix systems, such as Zip (.zip), ARC (.arc), gzip (.gz), Unix Compress (.Z), UUencoded (.uu), and tar (.tar) archives.
• Aladdin Expander is the equivalent decompression utility for Windows.
• Set up a "watch folder" and save archives to it. StuffIt Expander can be set to look into this folder at designated intervals and expand archives saved there.
• If you have StuffIt Deluxe, select an archive and, from the Finder, press Command-U to decompress it.
• StuffIt Expander will not expand encrypted or password-protected archives.
• Newer versions of StuffIt Expander may not be able to decompress archives compressed with older versions of StuffIt.

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