StuffIt

If somebody tells you StuffIt, they might be brushing you off rudely, but, especially if they're a Mac user, they might just be recommending their favorite file archiver. Since the late 1980s, StuffIt has been the most popular file archiving system for the Mac platform, with a version available for Windows as well (though it never achieved a high degree of popularity there). Like a number of other Mac archivers, StuffIt supports storing the Resource Fork along with the "regular" file, which is one reason Mac-specific archivers were popular in preference to "generic" ones like ZIP. StuffIt also produced more compact archives than its main competitor PackIt at the time it was first released in 1987, when its author, Raymond Lau, was still in high school. It has faced other competitors since, but remained on top. In recent times, however, with OS X being Unix-based, traditional Unix archiving and compression programs such as tar and gzip are getting increasing use on Macs.

The makers of StuffIt have also released the newer format StuffIt X.

These formats remain proprietary, and do not interoperate with other programs unless they are officially licensed.

History
StuffIt versions through 1.5.1 are credited to Raymond Lau. Following versions are by Aladdin Systems. Aladdin Systems was acquired by IMSI in 2004, and renamed to Allume Systems shortly afterward. In 2005, Allume Systems was acquired by Smith Micro.

Identification

 * Older StuffIt archives begin with ASCII "", and have "" at offset 10. The byte at offset 14 (the version number) is 0x01 for versions 1.5.x and earlier, or 0x02 for versions 1.6 - 4.5.


 * StuffIt 5 archives begin with a string of text that always starts with "". The byte at offset 82 has value.


 * See also StuffIt X.

Some .SIT files start with a 128-byte MacBinary header.

Software

 * Official site with downloads/purchases
 * The Unarchiver (based in part on XAD)
 * macutil → macunpack
 * Maconv (based in part on The Unarchiver)
 * XAD (mainly for Amiga)
 * (limited support)

Format info
Original format:
 * Archive format info, including StuffIt

V5 format:
 * Comments and code in the XAD (StuffIt.c) and The Unarchiver (XADStuffIt5Parser.m) source code
 * Maconv: Stuffit 5 format

Other information:
 * StuffIt method 15 compression format

Sample files

 * http://cd.textfiles.com/carousel344/MACTOSH/ ...
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/archive/sit/blackfor.sit
 * Macintosh Garden Collection ...

Other links

 * Wikipedia article