Re: A silly question about tar

[Cameron Hutchison <lists@xdna.net>]

Adam Porter wrote:

>Thanks for your replies, everyone.  It seems to me that there might be a
>market for a simple script frontend to tar that would handle shell-expanded
>wildcards; perhaps it could be included in Debian's package of tar.  Would
>that be a good idea?  Does anything like that already exist?

I have the following shell function defined in my .bashrc which I use to
extract the various archives I come across. It handles multiple archives
on the command line. Usage is simple:

$ x *.tar.gz

x () 
{ 
    for archive in "$@"; do
        case "$archive" in 
            *.tar* | *.t?z)
                case $archive in 
                    *.gz | *tgz | *.Z)
                        TARFLAGS="--use-compress-prog gzip"
                    ;;
                    *.bz | *.bz2 | *tbz)
                        TARFLAGS="--use-compress-prog bzip2"
                    ;;
                    *)
                        TARFLAGS=""
                    ;;
                esac;
                tar xf "$archive" ${TARFLAGS}
            ;;
            *.zip | *.ZIP)
                unzip -q "$archive"
            ;;
            *.deb)
                dpkg-deb -x "$archive" .
            ;;
            *.rar)
                unrar x "$archive"
            ;;
            *.cpio)
                cpio --extract --make-directories --file="$archive"
            ;;
            *.cpio.gz)
                gzip -dc "$archive" | cpio --extract --make-directories
            ;;
            *)
                echo "Unknown archive format" 1>&2
            ;;
        esac;
    done
}