Handling compressed files without remembering the parameters

12 May 2019

Often times, you might be asking yourself, what are the parameters for extracting a tar file? (answer: -xvf) In any case, to avoid memorizing individual parameters for zip, tar, rar etc, use atool.

Install atool using apt-get: sudo apt-get install atool. Commands like apack, aunpack, acat from atool are now at your disposal.
To extract all files from archive foobar.tar.gz to a subdirectory (or the current directory if it only contains one file):
```
aunpack foobar.tar.gz
```
To create a zip archive of two files foo and bar:
```
apack myarchive.zip foo bar
```
To compress the content of current directory into a zip file called comp.zip:
```
apack comp.zip *
```
To list contents of the rar archive stuff.rar:
```
als stuff.rar
```