What?
With this little tool you can extract almost any archive in Linux so you do not need to remember which tool and what command lines are necessary.

Why?
I got fed up with the sheer impossible number of compression formats out there. I am an avid linux command line user, but remembering 20 different commands with strange switches to get to the juicy content of a compressed files is too much for me.

Therefore I have just happily spent a few hours of my life to write the application e that identifies which extraction tool to call with what parameter in order to save me precious seconds of rereading forgotten manpages.

Usage
This marvelous extraction tool works like this:

Extract a zip file:

e file.zip

Extract a rar file:

e file.rar

Extract several archives, one after another:

e a.tar.gz b.tar.bz2 c.cab d.deb e.rpm

Extract every file from the current directory:

e *

If possible, e identifies the file format by the content and not by the extension, so for most filetypes e can extract it no matter how you name it. It supports rar, zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2, cab, ace, 7zip, dep, rpm, lha, lzop, rzip, and some more; it is very easy to extend it to support other compression utilities.

I was also inspired by the ugliness of the tool unp which tries to do exactly what e does. I did not like the implementation (written in Perl), and thought I can have the same features in a much simpler and more extensible way. The result is that e is just about 80 lines of code, where most of it is either comment or rules that define when to call what. If you know Ruby, have a look at the code.
Installation

For the impatient, installation on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ruby
wget http://martin.ankerl.com/files/e
chmod a+x e
sudo mv e /usr/local/bin

Step by step:

1. e is written in Ruby, so you need to install this.
2. Download e from here
3. copy e into your /usr/local/bin directory
4. make it executable with chmod +x /usr/local/bin/e.

If you find an archive that e cannot extract and you know a working rule for it, please tell me and I will integrate it.

Download
* Get e here.

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