Ditch that unpack-all-the-things shell script for atool
tech, tips
You know that feeling of dread when you unzip something your idiot Windows-using friend (“more of an acquaintance, really”) sent you and it spews a zillion files all over your $PWD.
“Why don’t they pack up the folder just like every sensible person familiar with tar?”
They’re using Windows, remember? Right-click stuff.zip, select “extract to folder stuff” , reboot to apply changes.
You could do unzip -d of course but that’s a hassle when there is just one file inside plus then you also have to remember that it’s unrar x and tar -C <target_dir> -xf and why isn’t there a tool that does the smart thing aren’t computers supposed to make the life easier sheesh.
And being the clever programmer you are, you calculate that spending 20 minutes automating a task that saves 5 seconds is totally worth it.
Except it takes twice as long because you end up checking all the possible file extraction tools (“if I’m spending the time might as well do it right”) installing the ones you din’t even know existed and making sure it all works and “what’s the right syntax for bash switch again?”
And then you want to share this perfect little tool with everyone because open source and if you’re lucky someone will ask the dreadful question “why don’t you just use atool?” .
Thanks, smartass, why didn’t you say so a week ago when I started coding this?
So yeah, atool. It’s a collection of tools that do god knows what, but it also contains aunpack which does exactly what you want only right.
You type aunpack whatever.zip or .rar or .tar or .tar.gz or .tgz or .tar.bz or .tar.xz or .tar.ohmygodz and it will extract it to a temp directory. Then it looks inside. If there’s only one item, it will move it to PWD. Otherwise it will rename the temp dir to the archive file name sans the extension.
Magic!
And it’s already packaged for ubuntu:
apt-get install atool
and fedora:
yum install atool
and rhel:
yum install atool
and debian
apt-get install atool
And suse
zypper in atool
and arch
pacman -S atool
|
Note
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using the more arcane invocations of pacman may wake up The Old Ones as a side effect |
and gentoo
emerge atool
and mint
apt-get install atool
and mac os:
brew install atool
Not only is atool in everywhere the package is always called the same! Badass.
I know aunpack is’s a bit of a mouthful (handful? keyboardful?), but I’m sure you’re able to alias it as unblar or ex (e is already taken up by emacs, obviously).
Now someone write this for package managers, PLEASE!
