Feature request: Replacement utils!

[geoff-nixon]

This is something of a "long term" request, but I thought I'd get it on the books.

It would be so great, to one day, have drop-in replacements for some of the utilities that libarchive is already 125% capable of replacing, except for the lack of executables that can handle arguments and archives way the legacy utilities do.

Not because I wan't these utilities to exist, but they do exist. And, as they demand custom syntax, and they get called, all the time, from random scripts and programs out of ones control, thus we all still have a jumble of slow heirloom archive utilities with which we contend.

My wishlist (in order):

• bsdpax (Terrible, committee-written utility. Yeah, I know. Great format though, and it is POSIX.)
• bsdunrar (No free software implementation to date, I don't think ...?)
• bsd[un]zip (Info-Zip syntax)
• bsd7z[arx]
• bsdxar (...and bsdpkgutil for --expand-full) ;))
• bsdmtree (maybe?)

For myself, I'm good with llvm-ar for ar files, and shell archives scare me, so I think that would do it.

P.S. I would take a stab at it myself (maybe one day...), but I'm sooooo terrible at arg parsing in C it would probably be 20 years for any of them to work correctly. I've written a few rudimentary scripts that wrap bsdtar, but they're not exactly "robust". Real drop in replacement utils, being able to get rid of Info-Zip for good... that would make me very, very happy.

:) Thanks folks!

[geoff-nixon]

I just saw on the "Who uses libarchive?" page:

Dag-Erling Smørgrav's "unzip" is standard with FreeBSD 8

Anyone have a link? I would imagine the code would be pretty portable?

[E5ten]

@geoff-codes https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/usr.bin/unzip/unzip.c, on glibc at least, something needs to be used in place of optreset (a BSD getopt thing), and for FNM_CASEFOLD _GNU_SOURCE needs to be defined.

[Artoria2e5]

something needs to be used in place of optreset

There are two ways of working around that:

• Gnulib says glibc does the same thing with optind = 0, so that is an option.
• We can just disable the whole two-pass parsing thing for glibc, because glibc getopts already parses the whole string[] for options (minus what comes after the usual --).

[vapier]

should this be used as a tracker bug and open individual requests for each tool ? otherwise seems like this can drag out and get hard to keep track of tool state when talking about ~10 independent tools.