There are multitude of archiving tools to manage dozens of archiving file formats. Each tool has its own commands and parameters. If your system has GUI installed, there won't be a problem to manage archive files. Just right click the zip files and click extract or extract files. Likewise, right click on any folder or file and choose Compress to compress them. On the contrary, if you have a system with only CLI, you will have to memorize all commands and parameters for managing different archive format files. This can be little difficult and unnecessary too. No worries! Meet Patool, a portable command line archive file manager that supports almost all archive formats. In a nutshell, we don't need to install numerous archive managers. Patool is just enough to do all sort of archiving stuffs.
The list of supported archive file formats are given below.
- 7z (.7z, .cb7),
- ACE (.ace, .cba),
- ADF (.adf),
- ALZIP (.alz),
- APE (.ape),
- AR (.a),
- ARC (.arc),
- ARJ (.arj),
- BZIP2 (.bz2),
- CAB (.cab),
- COMPRESS (.Z),
- CPIO (.cpio),
- DEB (.deb),
- DMS (.dms),
- FLAC (.flac),
- GZIP (.gz),
- ISO (.iso),
- LRZIP (.lrz),
- LZH (.lha, .lzh),
- LZIP (.lz),
- LZMA (.lzma),
- LZOP (.lzo),
- RPM (.rpm),
- RAR (.rar, .cbr),
- RZIP (.rz),
- SHN (.shn),
- TAR (.tar, .cbt),
- XZ (.xz),
- ZIP (.zip, .jar, .cbz)
- ZOO (.zoo)
- and many.
Table of Contents
Install Patool, the Command line Archive file manager
Patool can be installed easily using Pip, a package manager for installing software written using Python.
Let us install python-pip first.
On Arch Linux and derivatives:
$ sudo pacman -S python-pip
On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint:
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora:
$ sudo yum install python-pip
Or,
$ sudo dnf install python-pip
On SUSE/openSUSE:
$ sudo zypper in python-pip
Once pip installed, run the following command to install Patool archive manager.
$ sudo pip install patool
Sample output:
Collecting patool Downloading patool-1.12-py2.py3-none-any.whl (77kB) 100% |████████████████████████████████| 81kB 41kB/s Installing collected packages: patool Successfully installed patool-1.12
How to use Patool in Linux
Patool usage is fairly simple and straight forward. Let me show you how to use it with some examples.
Extract files
To extract a compressed file, run:
$ patool extract test1.zip
Sample output:
patool: Extracting test1.zip ... patool: ... test1.zip extracted to `Inter.txt'.
Also, you can extract multiple and different archive format files in one go.
$ patool extract test1.zip test2.rar
Or,
$ patool --verbose test3 test4.tar.gz
Here, --verbose parameter will display more info about what patool actually does, and display the output of helper applications.
View contents of archive file without extracting it
You can view the contents of an archive file without having to extract it.
$ patool list linux-4.9.tar.xz
This command lists all files of linux-4.9.tar.xz tarball.
Create archives
To create an archive, just run:
$ patool create myfiles.zip *.txt
The above command will create a zip file of all txt files in the current directory.
Sample output:
patool: Creating myfiles.zip ... patool: ... myfiles.zip created.
To create archive of a file and folder in the current directory, run:
$ patool --verbose create myarchive.zip file1.txt directory1/
Sample output:
patool: Creating myarchive.zip ... patool: ... myarchive.zip created.
View difference between two archives
To view the differences between two archives, run:
$ patool diff test1-0.6.1.gz test2-0.6.1.bz2
Sample output:
patool: Comparing test1-0.6.1.gz with test2-0.6.1.bz2 ... patool: running /usr/bin/diff -urN /tmp/Unpack_WdttOc /tmp/Unpack_8ZDyPK patool: ... no differences found.
Repack archive to different format
Patool can able to repackage an archive to a different format as shown below:
$ patool repack test1.tar.gz test1.tar.bz2
Sample output:
patool: running '/usr/bin/gzip' -c -d -- 'test1.tar.gz' > '/tmp/Unpack_syZlDc/test1' patool: with shell='True' patool: ... test1.tar.gz extracted to `/tmp/Unpack_syZlDc'. patool: ... repacking successful.
Shrink archive size
Not happy about the compression size? Well, you can recompress an archive to a smaller size.
$ patool recompress images.zip
Sample output:
patool: Recompressing test1.zip ... patool: ... test1.zip extracted to `/tmp/Unpack_tiX7Om'. patool: ... recompressed file is now 35B smaller.
List archive formats
To list all supported archive formats, run:
$ patool formats
Getting help
To view all available commands along with their brief explanations, run:
$ patool -h
For more details, check the official website given at the end of this article or refer the man pages.
$ man patool
Suggested read:
- dtrx - An universal archive extraction tool for Linux
- How To Archive Files And Directories In Linux [Part 1]
- 10 Different Ways To View The Contents Of An Archive Or Compressed File
Hope this helps. Have you already used this? Great! Let us know your experience about it.
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