One other small note today: A while back I mentioned atool, as a universal unpacker — a kind of wrapper for four or five or more different decompression programs. In reply someone mentioned unp, and then a while later I found dtrx.
I feel obligated to mention the other two now, since I made note of the first. The sad part is, not a one of them — not even atool — has much to show. So no screenshots today. š¦
And they all work equally well, although dtrx by default seems quieter than the other two. I gave each one a quick turn at the same compressed file, and I found no problems.
I should expect as much though, since not a one of them probably actually does anything aside from invoke the appropriate decompressor. It’s those underlying applications that would be at fault, if there was a problem.
Which means the question of which one to use becomes academic: Do you want to type out u-n-p, d-t-r-x or a-t-o-o-l? three letters, four letters or five?
Oh, but then command completion messes everything up. … š š
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I want to type two: 7z š
By the way, deco is a good one, too.
http://hartlich.com/deco/
Do all four of these tools support the same types of compressed files, or are some more comprehensive than others?
I just have a little bit of code in my .bashrc (I think I stole it from someone else) to deal with decompressing files.
# Automagically choose the right command to extract an archive # Syntax: extract *compressedfile* extract () { if [ -f $1 ] ; then case $1 in *.tar.bz2) tar xvjf $1 ;; *.tar.gz) tar xvzf $1 ;; *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;; *.rar) unrar x $1 ;; *.gz) gunzip $1 ;; *.tar) tar xvf $1 ;; *.tbz2) tar xvjf $1 ;; *.tgz) tar xvzf $1 ;; *.zip) unzip $1 ;; *.Z) uncompress $1 ;; *.7z) 7z x $1 ;; *) echo "don't know how to extract '$1'..." ;; esac else echo "'$1' is not a valid file!" fi }I like to manually issue the command according to the file type. This way i won’t forget the syntax, for times when these combined utilities aren’t available.
But, i must agree these things are convenient, and if someone cares to add a gui to it, then they would be noob friendly too š
7z are just 2 letters š
@gogi-goji beautiful, tnx 4 sharing!
There is also ‘e’.
http://fail2care.com/e-extract-any-archive
unp does not have a website.
atool is written in perl.
dtrx is written in python.
e is written in ruby.
So I don’t like unp and atool.
dtrx has more features I need then e. (like “make sure everything is in 1 subdirectory”), and -t (list) support. So that’s my pick.