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There are large number of archive file formats – .zip, .tar.gz, .tar, .gz, .7zip, .rar, etc etc..

I find it difficult to remember the command line options for extracting different archive file formats. So, I wrote a bash function which given a archive filename as an input extracts it.

Here’s the function :

extract () {
if [ -f $1 ] ; then
case $1 in
*.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
*.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
*.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
*.rar) rar x $1 ;;
*.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
*.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
*.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
*.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
*.zip) unzip $1 ;;
*.z) uncompress $1 ;;
*) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via extract ()" ;;
esac
else
echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
fi
}

This function is pretty self explanatory. But as it is not powerful. It becomes the ultimate tool for extractive archive files if you copy this function in you bashrc file (~/.bashrc).

Now you can simply extract any file like this:


$extract test.tar.gz

Hope you like this function.

Note: This function doesn’t work with files have space in its name. I didn’t waste time in solving this issue as I normally don’t use such filenames. If any of you solve this issue, please do let me know. I would include it with your name in this post.