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Discussion on: Open Source Adventures: Episode 17: Universal Command Line Unpacker unall

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jayjeckel profile image
Jay Jeckel • Edited

Very interesting tool and I'm not surprised you love it as it's build to your own preferences, as any good personal tool is, but other unpackers don't do those things because not everyone wants them done. Personally, I wouldn't want any of that automation.

I rarely want to unzip and immediately trash the archive. That's something I'm only going to do after I've looked through the unzipped contents. As for the issue of zips have packed or loose files, that is annoying, but it isn't enough of an issue that I would need it automated and I definitely won't want it to be the default as most times I have a zip with loose files it's because those files are supposed to be unzip into a specific place.

As for other programs, I can't speak to linux or mac, but on windows the 7zip tool does everything I've ever needed. It's context menu integration even has items to extract to the local directory or to a wrapper directory named after the zip. It doesn't auto-trash the archive or auto-wrap loose contents, but those aren't universal preferences, so I'm glad for that.

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taw profile image
Tomasz Wegrzanowski

It would be fine if smart-autowrap and autotrash-on-success were some non-default command line switches, but no tool even offers that.

The problem with manual wrap tools like 7zip offer is that you need to know if archive is already wrapped or not, or it will double wrap, so you then need to unwrap things.

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Jay Jeckel

Fair enough, more options are good, so some cli switches for that functionality would be nice. If I remember right, the 7zip tool has a cli switch to drop the root archive folder, effectively making all archives loose file containers, but as I recall it has some issues and doesn't reliably work across all archive types.