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WinRAR also seems to handle opening a file in an external app without manually extracting much better. I can just double-click a file in an archive and open it in an external app, while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file. Rather annoying if you're just trying to quickly check something like the readme.txt in an archive.





>while with 7-zip it seems to immediately delete the temporary file so the external app ends up trying to open a non-existent file.

No, 7-zip only deletes the file after you close its window, so as long as you don't close 7-zip any apps should be able to open those files. Winrar doesn't delete on close, but that has its own problems, namely that you accumulate a bunch of extracted files in your %TEMP% directory, and have to run disk cleanup to delete them.


I just tried it with 7-zip 19.0, and double-clicking a video file in a 7z archive, and VLC could not open the extracted file because it didn't exist.

E: Tried again with procmon monitoring 7-zip, and after it completed writing the file it deleted it.


There must be something funky with your setup. I just tested using the exact version of 7-zip and latest version of VLC in a fresh windows VM, and it doesn't have you issue you described. I can even see the file lying around in %TEMP%\7z[random characters], and they aren't deleted until I close the 7-zip window.



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