Universal extractors
Solution 1
I use atool. It does the job. It works with many, though not all formats:
tar, gzip, bzip2, bzip, lzip, lzop, lzma, zip, rar, lha, arj, arc, p7zip etc.
These compression tools are still needed, though as atool is simply a front end for them.
I particularly like the als
command it provides which lists the contents of any supported archive format.
The main atool
command uses its own flags for extracting archives (passing the appropriate flags to the specific underlying extraction tools).
Oh, and it's in some distributions' repositories (Fedora in my case, though as I recall, back when I used Ubuntu it wasn't in their repos then. and I installed from a tarball.).
Update on Repositories: atool is in the following distributions' repositories (current releases checked only):
- Fedora
- Debian (thanks @terdon, and, presumably, it's derivatives like Ubuntu)
- Ubuntu (q.e.d., and, presumably, derivatives like Mint)
- Open Suse
- CentOS (and, presumably, RHEL)
- Arch Linux
I'm sure there are others... plausibly, most modern distributions.
Answer for Updated Question "How can I configure something like atool to not use unzip to extract zip files ... and to use gunzip instead":
Edit the atool config file ~/.atoolrc
and add the line:
path_unzip /usr/bin/gunzip
with the correct path to your gunzip program.
See the man page for the complete list of possible variables you can put in this config file, of which there are a lot. If the command line options necessary for gunzip are different than unzip, you may have to modify the atool source (perl) itself.
Solution 2
The AVFS filesystem presents a view of the filesystem where every archive file (e.g. /path/to/foo.zip
) is accessible as a directory (~/.avfs/path/to/foo/zip#
for this example). AVFS provides read-only access to most common archive file formats.
mountavfs
cp -Rp ~/.avfs$PWD/large_file.zip\# extraction_directory
Avfs uses external helpers which can be easily configured by editing files in /usr
(unfortunately there's no way as of avfs 1.0 to use files in /usr/local
or in your home directory, you need to edit files in /usr
or recompile). /usr/share/avfs/extfs/ext-uzip
is the script to deal with .zip
files, change it if you don't want to use /usr/bin/unzip
. You may be able to get away with using 7z instead: try editing /usr/share/avfs/extfs/extfs.ini
and change the line ext-uzip
to u7z .zip
.
Related videos on Youtube
Amelio Vazquez-Reina
I'm passionate about people, technology and research. Some of my favorite quotes: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question" -- J. Tukey, 1962. "Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader" -- Donna Dubinsky, quoted in "Trillion Dollar Coach", 2019.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
-
Amelio Vazquez-Reina over 1 year
With an increasing number of archive/compression file formats, is there a single free/open-source command line tool to rule them all? Perhaps something with a consistent / unified set of flags? (note my friendly implicit reference to tar)
I once run into a set of aliases meant to largely simplify the task of compressing/de-compressing files with bindings to
tar
and other utils, but I can't find this anymore.Update: How can I configure something like
atool
to not useunzip
to extract zip files (which apparently can't handle files larger than 4GB) and to usegunzip
instead?$ aunpack large_file.zip error: Zip file too big (greater than 4294959102 bytes) Archive: large_file.zip warning [large_file.zip]: 1491344848 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile (attempting to process anyway) error [large_file.zip]: start of central directory not found; zipfile corrupt. (please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly) aunpack: unzip ...: non-zero return-code
-
Admin about 11 yearsyet another solution: packages.qa.debian.org/u/unp.html
-
Admin about 11 years@frostschutz. Do you know if there is anything that may make
unpack
different fromatool
? -
Admin about 11 yearsDunno. As Evan's answer shows, such a program is fairly trivial. Use whatever works for you. For unpacking zip files, my personal preference is
7z
. -
Admin about 11 years@user815423426 I've added instructions for your updated question to my existing answer.
-
Admin over 3 yearsRelated: askubuntu.com/questions/338758/…
-
-
Admin about 11 yearsThis looks great. Is this for bash?
-
Admin about 11 yearsI've only tested this with
bash
andzsh
, but it should work withsh
as well. -
Amelio Vazquez-Reina about 11 yearsThanks. This looks great. Do you know if, aside from being able to download the tarball, there is a (git/bzr) repository for it, or perhaps for a fork of it?
-
Sleeping_Giant about 11 yearsThere doesn't appear to be a git repo for it. There is a, shudder, cvs repo: savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=atool . However, the source is in the tarball and the tool is written in perl, so easily modifiable by you or anyone who feels the urge.
-
terdon about 11 years@user815423426 it is also in the Debian repos.
-
Admin about 11 yearsThis is exceptionally aesthetically pleasing for a shell function. One caveat would be that you'd want to make sure you've got all the relevant binaries installed, or remove lines for those you don't have installed.