ucat (1)

NAME

unp - a shell frontend for uncompressing/unpacking tools

SYNOPSIS

unp [-u] file [ files ... ] [ -- backend args ... ] ucat file [ files ... ]
unp is a small script with only one goal: Extract as many archives as possible, of any kind and from any path to the current directory, preserving the subdirectory structure where needed. Is a Do-What-I-Want utility and helps managing several extraction programs without looking for needed options for the particular tool or worrying about the installation of the needed program.

Run unp without arguments to see the list of supported archive formats.

The special version ucat acts as wrapper for commands that can output the extracted data to standard output, like bzip (bzcat), gzip (zcat), tar, zip and others.

USAGE

unp extracts one or more files given as arguments on the command line. Additionally, it may pass some options to the backend tools (like tar options) when they are appended after `--´.

There is also a special option (-u) which is very useful for extracting Debian packages. Using -u, unp extracts the package (i.e. the ar archive) first, then extracts data.tar.gz in the current directory and then control.tar.gz in control/<filename>/.

NOTES

unp will try to decompress into a FILE.unp if it get trouble with existing files. But don't count on this feature, always look for free working space before using unp.

Unlike gunzip, which decompresses the file in the target directory of the source file, unp uses the current directory for output.

AUTHOR

Development started by Andre Karwath <andre.karwath@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de>
Now maintained and packaged for Debian by Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org>