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Is there any linux command-line utility that can handle both Windows and Linux archive formats ?

I'm writing a script that needs to be able to extract info ( listing files/folders inside is crucial ) from most popular archive formats used on both OS'es.

Or maybe a script that provides an API, selecting the appropriate utility depending on filetype ?

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What sort of archives are you thinking of? TAR vs ZIP? Or 'ar' vs the Windows librarian? Or something else? – Jonathan Leffler Sep 14 '10 at 19:20
Funny - the close votes say "doesn't belong here", but one chooses SU and the other SF. – Jonathan Leffler Sep 14 '10 at 19:20
Most common formats - such as TAR for Linux and RAR, ZIP, 7z for Windows - I have many archives on my NTFS partitions, most in RAR or ZIP format, plus some in 7z, but I'm on Linux most of the time so I'm looking for an app that can handle all of these formats. – Mihai Rotaru Sep 14 '10 at 21:53
@Jonathan: Well, that is an issue of concern to both groups (general uses and administrators). I went with Super User. – dmckee Sep 15 '10 at 1:31

migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 15 '10 at 2:20

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

atool works great for just this sort of thing. The great part is that you don't have to juggle the various command-line switches for tar, zip, rar, etc in your brain, just aunpack <your-compressed-file> and voila! Another great feature: it makes sure your archive gets extracted into its own directory (great for when people distribute archives that aren't packed into a top-level directory!)

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yep, that's exactly what I was looking for, thanx ! – Mihai Rotaru Sep 15 '10 at 10:53
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I think 7zip supports most formats. There's a command line utility called 7z.

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it does, but it's man page mentions that it shouldn't be used for backup purposes on Linux – Mihai Rotaru Sep 15 '10 at 10:54
Extracting the listing should be safe. If your restoring then perhaps not. I would expect restore of Windows archives on Linux to results in messed up permissions/ownership at the least. – Chris Nava Sep 15 '10 at 14:55

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