tarx

tarx is similar to ouch (https://github.com/ouch-org/ouch). Points of differentiation:

• 👍🏻 tarx and its dependencies are written in memory-safe languages (Rust and Go).
  • ouch binds to C libraries.
• 👍🏻 tarx and its dependencies are permissively licensed.
  • ouch uses the unrar crate, which uses the proprietary UnRAR library.
• 👍🏻 tarx can extract many encrypted archives (.7z, .rar, and .zip). Note that not all encryption schemes supported by these formats may work.
  • ouch does not support extracting any encrypted archives.
• ❓ tarx always extracts the contents of the archive to a directory with the name of archive, excluding the file extension.
  • ouch has a smart_unpack function (https://github.com/ouch-org/ouch/blob/4ac8e2ba9126e50af73b12cdfd9955a3161f2bab/src/commands/decompress.rs#L233-L239) that causes its behavior to vary depending on whether the archive has one or multiple root entries (directories or files). This "smart" functionality cannot be disabled, and annoyed me so much that I wrote tarx. You probably don't care about this.
• 👎🏻 tarx is untested ("it works on my machine").
  • ouch has a test suite and thousands of users.
• 👎🏻 tarx only supports decompression, and only supports archive files (e.g. directory-to-archive.tar.gz).
  • ouch supports compression, and can decompress single files (e.g. downloaded-wikipedia-article.html.gz).
• 👎🏻 The decompression done via FFI to Go code is very naive, and requires the entire archive, plus its decompressed contents, to fit in memory.

Installation

# TODO Publish to crates.io
cargo install --git https://github.com/andrewliebenow/tarx

Decompression of .rar, .tar.bz2, and .tar.zst files is provided via FFI to Go code. This requires the foreign feature to be enabled (which it is by default). The Go FFI will not work with musl until golang/go#13492 is resolved. In musl environments, disable the foreign feature with --no-default-features:

cargo install --git https://github.com/andrewliebenow/tarx --no-default-features

By default, tarx uses the allocator provided by the dlmalloc crate instead of the system allocator. This too can be disabled with --no-default-features.

Usage

❯ tarx --help
Extract a .7z, .rar, .tar, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, .tar.xz, .tar.zst, or .zip file to a new directory

Usage: tarx [OPTIONS] <ARCHIVE_FILE_PATH>

Arguments:
  <ARCHIVE_FILE_PATH>  Path of the archive file to be processed

Options:
  -p, --password <PASSWORD>  Password of the encrypted archive file to be processed
  -t, --type-password        Interactively enter the password of the encrypted archive file
  -l, --list-files           List files instead of extracting them (not currently implemented for .7z and .zip files)
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

License

Author: Andrew Liebenow

Licensed under the MIT License, see ./LICENSE.

tarx depends on libraries written by other authors. See ./Cargo.toml and ./foreign/go.mod for its direct (i.e. non-transitive) dependencies.

Note that all dependencies of tarx (direct and transitive) are permissively licensed (not copyleft).