dtrx: Intelligent archive extraction

Introduction

dtrx stands for “Do The Right Extraction.” 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:

$ dtrx linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2

That's basically the same thing as:

$ tar -jxf linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2

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?

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

dtrx takes care of all those problems for you, too:

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

dtrx is simple and powerful. Just use the same command for all your archive files, and they'll never frustrate you again.

Features

• Handles many archive types: You only need to remember one simple command to extract tar, zip, cpio, deb, rpm, gem, 7z, cab, gz, bz2, and lzma files. If they have any extra compression, like tar.bz2, dtrx will take care of that for you, too.
• Keeps everything organized: dtrx will make sure that archives are extracted into their own dedicated directories.
• Sane permissions: dtrx makes sure you can read and write all the files you just extracted, while leaving the rest of the permissions intact.
• Recursive extraction: dtrx can find archives inside the archive and extract those too.

Download

Download dtrx 6.0. The SHA1 checksum for this file is dbe0211c90d6d03035f612fe31f96c825aa75274. New features in this release include:

• When you specify -v at the command line, dtrx will display the files it extracts, much like tar.
• When dtrx prompts you about how to handle recursive archives, you now have the option of listing what those archives before making a decision.
• dtrx will now provide more information about why a particular extraction attempt failed. It will show you error messages from all the attempts it made, rather than only the last error it got. It will also detect and warn you when one of the underlying extraction tools, like cabextract, cannot be found.
• dtrx does a better job of cleaning up after itself. It wouldn't always clean up temporary files after certain errors; that has been fixed. It also catches SIGINT and SIGTERM and cleans up before finishing execution.
• Version 5.0 introduced a regression such that dtrx would not offer to extract recursive archives that were hidden under subdirectories. Version 6.0 fixes that.

Requirements

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 subprocess module. You'll need the usual tools for the archive types you want to extract: for example, if you're extracting zip files, you'll need zipinfo and unzip.

Installation

You can just put scripts/dtrx 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:

python setup.py install

See the included INSTALL file for more information.