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<h1>dtrx: Intelligent archive extraction</h1>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

<p><span class="pname">dtrx</span> stands for &ldquo;Do The Right
Extraction.&rdquo; It's a tool for Unix-like systems that takes all the
hassle out of extracting archives.  Here's an example of how you use
it:</p>

<pre>$ dtrx linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2</pre>

<p>That's basically the same thing as:</p>

<pre>$ tar -jxf linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2</pre>

<p>But there's more to it than that.  You know those really annoying files
that don't put everything in a dedicated directory, and have the
permissions all wrong?</p>

<pre>$ tar -zvxf random-tarball.tar.gz
foo
bar
data/
data/text
$ cd data/
cd: permission denied: data</pre>

<p><span class="pname">dtrx</span> takes care of all those problems for
you, too:</p>

<pre>$ dtrx random-tarball.tar.gz
$ cd random-tarball/data
$ cat text
This all works properly.</pre>

<p><span class="pname">dtrx</span> is simple and powerful.  Just use the
same command for all your archive files, and they'll never frustrate you
again.</p>

<h2>Features</h2>

<ul>

<li><strong>Handles many archive types</strong>: You only need to remember
one simple command to extract

<span class="pname">tar</span>,
<span class="pname">zip</span>,
<span class="pname">cpio</span>,
<span class="pname">deb</span>,
<span class="pname">rpm</span>,
<span class="pname">gem</span>,
<span class="pname">7z</span>,
<span class="pname">cab</span>,
<span class="pname">gz</span>,
<span class="pname">bz2</span>,
<span class="pname">lzma</span>, and many kinds of
<span class="pname">exe</span> files, including Microsoft Cabinet archives,
InstallShield archives, and self-extracting <span class="pname">zip</span>
files.

If they have any extra compression, like <span
class="pname">tar.bz2</span>, <span class="pname">dtrx</span> will take
care of that for you, too.</li>

<li><strong>Keeps everything organized</strong>: <span
class="pname">dtrx</span> will make sure that archives are extracted into
their own dedicated directories.</li>

<li><strong>Sane permissions</strong>: <span class="pname">dtrx</span> makes
sure you can read and write all the files you just extracted, while leaving
the rest of the permissions intact.</li>

<li><strong>Recursive extraction</strong>: <span class="pname">dtrx</span> can
find archives inside the archive and extract those too.</li>

</ul>

<h2>Download</h2>

<p><a href="dtrx-6.1.tar.gz">Download <span class="pname">dtrx</span>
6.1</a>.  The SHA1 checksum for this file
is <tt>2cd7c5e1ca2e83a942e5af58dceb0700063ce03d</tt>.  New features in this
release include:</p>

<ul>

<li>Add support for InstallShield archives, using
the <span class="pname">unshield</span> command.</li>
<li>The wording of many of the interactive prompts has been adjusted
to be clearer and provide more information to the user
immediately.</li>
<li><span class="pname">dtrx</span> 6.1 does a better job protecting
against race conditions when extracting a single file.</li>
<li>If you used the -f option, and extracted an archive that only contained
one file or directory, <span class="pname">dtrx</span> 6.0 would still
prompt you to ask how it should be
extracted.  <span class="pname">dtrx</span> 6.1 fixes this, extracting the
contents to the current directory as -f requires.</li>
<li>Recursive extraction would not work well
in <span class="pname">dtrx</span> 6.0 when the contents of the original
archive were a single file.  This has been fixed
in <span class="pname">dtrx</span> 6.1.</li>

</ul>

<p>If you would like to try the latest development version—or maybe do some
work on it yourself—you can check out the
project's <a href="http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/">Mercurial</a>
repository.  A
<a href="http://www.brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/dtrx/">web repository</a> is
available, or you can just run:</p>

<pre>$ hg clone http://www.brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/dtrx</pre>

<h2>Requirements</h2>

<p>If you have Python 2.4 or greater, this should work out of the box.  If
you're stuck on Python 2.3, you can use this if you install
the <a href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/~astrand/popen5/">subprocess
module</a>.  You'll need the usual tools for the archive types you want to
extract: for example, if you're extracting <span class="pname">zip</span>
files, you'll need <span class="pname">zipinfo</span>
and <span class="pname">unzip</span>.  See the INSTALL file included
with <span class="pname">dtrx</span> for a complete list of necessary
utilities.</p>

<h2>Installation</h2>

<p>You can just put <span class="pname">scripts/dtrx</span> wherever is
convenient for you, but if you want to install the program system-wide, you
can also run the following command as root or equivalent:</p>

<pre>python setup.py install</pre>

<p>See the included <tt>INSTALL</tt> file for more information.</p>

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