Unpack is a simple and ugly python script to handle multiple archives.

Instead typing tar -xvzf /unzip/gzip etc you just need to know:

unpack

After unpack command, type the name of the target archive

unpack archive.tar
unpack archive.gz
unpack archive.zip
...

If archive has been successfully processed by unpack, it will create a decompressed directory/file in the same directory as target archive.

So is it just bunch of decompression tools stitched into a python script? Pretty much yeah. However unpack has one additional feature: it repacks ugly archives.

"Ugly" archive is an archive which has more than one file/directory at the top level.

Ugly archive:

/foo
/foo2.xyz
/foo3.sth

Nice archive:

/dir/foo
/dir/foo2.xyz
/dir/foo3.sth

Whenever unpack detecs an ugly archive it creates a new top directory and extracts files there, instead of spilling them all over the place.

Unpack has only one option: -d (delete).

If you run the following:

unpack -d archive.tar

unpack will decompress files and then delete archive.tar

Add unpack script to a folder that is on $PATH.

e.g. /usr/local/bin

tar
zip
gz
7z

If you want to add code to extract more archive formats, feel free to add it