dtrx

dtrx is 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

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:
# python setup.py install

Features:

• Handles many archive types: You only need to remember one simple command to extract tar, zip, cpio, deb, rpm, gz, and bz2 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.

What is new in this release:

• This version supports LZH archives, using the lha tool.
• It includes a couple of minor bugfixes.

What is new in version 6.3:

• This release adds support for RAR archives.
• It also fixes a bug that caused dtrx to crash when extracting certain kinds of archives with the -v option, and avoids spurious warnings under Python 2.6.

Requirements:

• Python