I think the contention comes when you get down to brass tacks; note the author emphasizes "really useful", and hence probably means, sure, your software might be "useful", but it's not useful to the extant that a program you can insert into a pipeline or script is.
sure, many unix programs might be useful, but without good UX design, remain horrible to use (see: tar). taking the unix philosophy as gospel is myopic; computer programs are meant to be used by people, and a program can only be useful if it's well-designed for use by people.
It also makes the right choice when several files not under a directory are in the archive (create a new directory and place files inside), when the archive contains a single file (just place the file in the current directory), and when a clash of names can occur with a file/directory already present in your cwd (unpacks in a directory named 'Unpack-XYZ')
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I think the contention comes when you get down to brass tacks; note the author emphasizes "really useful", and hence probably means, sure, your software might be "useful", but it's not useful to the extant that a program you can insert into a pipeline or script is.
sure, many unix programs might be useful, but without good UX design, remain horrible to use (see: tar). taking the unix philosophy as gospel is myopic; computer programs are meant to be used by people, and a program can only be useful if it's well-designed for use by people.
However, tar is a command-line program, and thus easy to interface with.
Thus, I recommend `atool`, which use tar, unzip, unrar, ... but wraps it all in a very good UX not depending on the archive type.
It also makes the right choice when several files not under a directory are in the archive (create a new directory and place files inside), when the archive contains a single file (just place the file in the current directory), and when a clash of names can occur with a file/directory already present in your cwd (unpacks in a directory named 'Unpack-XYZ')Unix is extremely well-designed for use by people. Unix people.
Unless you invert the relationship and install biztalk which we dub in the office "Unix done wrong". Both are useful. One is painful :)