Stop messing with tar and switch to atool

Overview

There are many file archive options. Each archive option has their own specialized commands to operate on them: create, list, extract, etc.

Back in 2001, Oskar Liljeblad created one single tool to operate in a consistent manner on all popular archive formats.

It's called atool and it's amazing.

Archive support

atool supports all major archive and compression schemes including various combinations of tar+zip.

Standardization

atool standardizes the behavior so no matter what archive you're dealing with its creation and extraction behaves the same way.

Have you ever extracted a tarball and had 1000 files scattered in the current directory? I've done that. Many times. It sucks.

With atool, extracting a .tar archive will automatically put the extracted files into a subdirectory. No more 52 card pickup.

Tutorial

I'll show you how to

create an archive
list its contents
extract the files
change the archive from one format to another.

mkdir atool-tutorial

cd atool-tutorial

echo 'hello' >> a.txt
echo 'good bye' >> b.txt

# Create a .zip file containing these two files

apack my-archive.zip a.txt b.txt

# Now have file called my-archive.zip
# Look inside the archive using atool's als command

als my-archive.zip

# Double check the file using 'file' command

file my-archive.zip

# my-archive.zip: Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract

# Test extract
rm a.txt
rm b.txt

ls

# Only the archive left in the directory

aunpack my-archive.zip

# Creates a subdirectory and extracts files to it

ls -lahrt my-archive

# Remove extracted directory, keeping the zip file

rm -rf my-archive

# Use atool to change the archive from .zip to .tar.gz

arepack my-archive.zip my-archive.tar.gz

ls -lahrt

# New file is .gz

file my-archive.tar.gz

# Demonstrate using gunzip/tar on this new file -- the old way

gunzip my-archive.tar.gz
tar xf my-archive.tar

# Files extracted to current directory, yuck!

ls -lahrt

# Remove the extracted files and tarball
rm a.txt
rm b.txt
rm my-archive.tar

# Try the tar.gz again, but using only atool

arepack my-archive.zip my-archive.tar.gz
aunpack my-archive.tar.gz

ls -lahrt

# Notice how atool didn't extract the tar.gz to current directory.
# atool created a specific subdirectory for it. Nice!

Wrap up

Get out of archive hell.

Stop using narrow commands like tar, gzip, gunzip, zip, bzip, etc. Too much to memorize.

There's even a tar comic from xkcd that highlights how awful the tar commands is.

Up your productivity by using higher level commands like atool.

One command to rule all archives!

If you have any problems, contact me on X at https://x.com/mleitz1