The only problem with lots of custom aliases (or custom keybindings in other programs like editors), is that the muscle memory burns you every time you have to work on a remote machine. I used to go custom-to-the-max with my config, but I’ve gradually shifted back to fewer and fewer aliases except for the most prevalent build/version control commands I run dozens of times each day.

This is not a good thing to have in your muscle memory. You should pause before you extract an archive. It may or may not have a top-level directory and depending on its origin it might be a bomb.

But universal extractor might come in handy. I like libarchive. It’s used by bsdtar.

I use bsdtar for this on Arch Linux. It’s the libarchive backed tar implementation from FreeBSD. It handles all formats you usually encounter. I have it aliased to tar for muscle memory reasons.

This is the reason I have alias vim=‘emacsclient -nc’

And relatedly the reason that I install dtrx on every machine I touch.

There’s the great atool wrapper out there to extract all kinds of archives (would love to hear of others)

https://github.com/mholt/archiver is an alternative, written in pure Go so a self-contained binary

I’ve been using unar which seems similar to atool. But I’m really hoping to find something better as I need to unpack zstandard time to time. Any suggestions?

Regarding the “would love to hear of others”: In Debian there are also the packages unp, zutils and patool:

• unp is what I actually use as “DWIM unzip” command, because unzip is heavily tied to this annoying ZIP format used on Windows all the time. ;-)

• And then there’s also zutils which replaces zcat, zgrep and friends which generic wrappers which also support bzip2, xz, lzma and other compression formats. The cool thing here is that this way you can zgrep through files with different compression formats in one go. And you never have to think anymore about if that one command is named bz2grep, bzgrep2 or just bzgrep. :-)

• Another one I’m aware of, but never really used it, is patool.

  EDIT: When looking through my shell aliases, I noticed that I was actually using patool quite often, because atool offers adiff but not an agrep. So I built it via alias agrep='patool search'. But I’m only using this for multi-file archive formats. Because for just compressed single file archives, there’s the zgrep from zutils which I use way more often.

Oh, and I of course also use atool, but mostly only one of its commands, namely als.

HTH

Neat trick!

There seem to be some terrible aliasing in the GIFs on my screen. I’d recommend using one of those terminal stream recorders instead, resulting in animated SVGs.

Solve this problem with a simple shell function:

# usage: unzip <file>
unzip () {
  if [ -f $1 ] ; then
    case $1 in
      *.tar.bz2)    tar xjf $1    ;;
      *.tar.gz)     tar xzf $1    ;;
      *.tar.xz)     tar xf $1     ;;
      *.tar)        tar xf $1     ;;
      *.tar.zst)    uzstd $1      ;;
      *.bz2)        bunzip2 $1    ;;
      *.rar)        unrar x $1    ;;
      *.gz)         gunzip $1     ;;
      *.tbz2)       tar xjf $1    ;;
      *.tgz)        tar xzf $1    ;;
      *.zip)        unzip $1      ;;
      *.Z)          uncompress $1 ;;
      *.7z)         7z x $1       ;;
      *.deb)        ar x $1       ;;
      *)    echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via ex()" ;;
    esac
  else
    echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
  fi
}

The aunpack alias is very easy to remember already.