The un tool is a universal uncompressor. The idea is that you invoke it like this:
un myarchive.whatever
and it will work out which decompression tool to use and create an invocation line for it.
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It will be careful not to let lots of files splay out in your current directory, putting them into a their own directory (unless the archive contains a single file or directory itself).
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It tests the processes exit code to determine whether extraction failed or not.