Universal command line unarchiving tool on a Mac

Question

Is there some command line tool which allows extracting files from most known archive types? Something like StuffIt Expander, but without gui.

Answer 1

The Unarchiver has two command line utilities since version 2.5 according to the website:

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. [..] If you have a compressed file that The Unarchiver does not open, please post a bug on the bug tracker, and include the file in question, and I will look into whether it is possible to add support for it!

[..]

There are now two command-line utilities available, unar and lsar, which can be used to unpack and list archives, respectively. They are still in development and not really feature-complete, but they should work. These are available as precompiled binaries for both OS X and Windows on the download page, and can also be built on Linux.

To download the command line tools (not included in the regular The Unarchiver download!), go to the project's google code downloads page and select unar0.2.zip (works as of September 20, 2010).

Answer 2

Try 7-Zip. In addition to its own native format (.7z) it can handle the following extensions: ZIP, gzip, bzip2, tar and, in betas for version 9, xz. It can also decompress (only) in the following formats: ARJ, CAB, CHM, cpio, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

A Windows command line version 7za.exe is included. For other platforms, a POSIX version named p7zip is available from the P7ZIP SourceForge project, and some of those ports are also linked from 7-Zip's download page. Unfortunately, the Mac link seems broken, so for OS X, either build it yourself or use MacPorts.

EDIT: For non-Windows versions go to the Downloads page. There you can find the source as well as pre-compiled binaries.

Answer 3

For the compression and archiving types that Mac OS X knows natively, you can just use open, and it'll invoke "Archive Utility" (formerly BOMArchiveHelper), just like double-clicking it from the Finder would have. This works for [pk]zip, gzip, bzip, bzip2, tar, pax, cpio, compress (.Z), etc. etc.

If you have apps installed that know how to unarchive other formats, and they have registered for those file extensions or magic(5) values, then the open command will launch those apps to handle those types. Of course you'll probably end up in those apps' GUIs.