Why hasn't anyone made (afaik) an all in one extractor that depends on all the popular compression tools and uses the appropriate one depending on the extension. That would be useful.
bsdtar does this, except by looking at the file format rather than looking at the extension. It supports tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images, compressed using gzip, bzip2, lzip, xz, lzma, or compress.
It's called tar. Seriously. I'm positive gnu tar will pick the compression engine based on the file contents, I think bsd does too. It's not a documented standard, but if all implementations support it, it may as well be.
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Why hasn't anyone made (afaik) an all in one extractor that depends on all the popular compression tools and uses the appropriate one depending on the extension. That would be useful.
bsdtar does this, except by looking at the file format rather than looking at the extension. It supports tar, pax, cpio, zip, xar, lha, ar, cab, mtree, rar, and ISO images, compressed using gzip, bzip2, lzip, xz, lzma, or compress.
It's called tar. Seriously. I'm positive gnu tar will pick the compression engine based on the file contents, I think bsd does too. It's not a documented standard, but if all implementations support it, it may as well be.
Someone has, it is called dtrx ("do the right thing extractor"):
http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/
7zip does most of them, but doesn't depend on the original tools.