deco is a Un*x program, written in C, that is able to extract various file formats using small “extractor wrapper” scripts.
Instead of having to remember e. g.
tar xjf 1.tar.bz2
unrar x 2.rar
flac -d 3.flac
dpkg-deb --extract 4.deb
you say
deco 1.tar.bz2 2.rar 3.flac 4.deb
and deco extracts them all, provided you’ve also installed the deco-archive package.
Some extractors extract in the current working directory, others use the
directory the archive resides in. deco extracts relative to the current working
directory, unless you give it the -a (“absolute”) option.
Some extractors delete the archive after successful extraction, others don’t.
deco preserves the archive after successful extraction, unless you give it the
-u (“unlink”) option.
Some extractors process the archive verbosely by default and expect you to
specify that quiet behavior is wanted. Others do the opposite. deco extracts
quietly, unless you give it the -v (“verbose”) option.
Some extractors will leave the partial content extracted so far around if
extraction fails. Others will delete it. deco will keep partial content, unless
you give it the -c (“clean”) option.
Some extractors refuse to even try extracting anything with an unknown
extension. deco can force an extractor to handle a file with any name. Use the
-e (“extension”) option: deco -e gz myarchive
There are extractors that create files with strange permissions. deco can reset these to sensible defaults implied by your current umask.
When you extract an archive that contains multiple files at its top level, you usually want them to be placed in a directory of their own. However, if the archive contains only one file or one big directory, that behavior would be annoying. The deco extraction algorithm does the right thing automatically: generally, if and only if archive.foo contains multiple files at its top level, a new directory called archive/ is created and the archive gets extracted there.
deco never overwrites files, nor does it need to prompt you for manual conflict resolution. If the file to be extracted is named foo and a file by that name already exists, the new file will be extracted as 1-foo, if that name also exists, 2-foo, and so on. Since at the top level only one new file or directory is created, at most this one file will have its name changed like that.
As all the heavy lifting is done in the core algorithm, adding support for new archive formats requires very little work.
-
Configure: Edit config.mk to change compiler/linker settings, the location to install at, or the location where deco looks for extractor wrappers.
-
Build: Run
make. If you have trouble building on BSD, try removing -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 from CPPFLAGS in config.mk. -
Install: Run
make install. (You will probably need to do this as the superuser.) To add support for popular archive formats, also install deco-archive. -
Use: Run
decoto see the usage message.
- deco-archive: support for popular archive formats
- deco-diskimage: support for filesystem disk images
Copyright 2007-2015 Peter Hartlich. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3.
- Zoë Stephenson for several bug reports
- Reuben Thomas for the Makefile uninstall target, suggesting that the usage message include deco’s version, and reporting various problems
- Steve Milner for the concept of what is now the
subdirectoryfile - Dirk Jagdmann for reporting the problem with extracting large files
- Michael Schwendt for diagnosing a crash when handling archive formats that always extract to a subdirectory