Various archive types can be created, extracted, tested and listed by patool. The advantage of patool is its simplicity in handling archive files without having to
The archive format is determined by the archive file extension and as a fallback with file(1).
patool supports 7z (.7z), ZIP (.zip, .jar), GZIP (.gz), compress (.Z), BZIP2 (.bz2), TAR (.tar), ARJ (.arj), CAB (.cab), CPIO (.cpio), RPM (.rpm), DEB (.deb), LZOP
(.lzo), LZMA (.lzma), XZ (.xz) and RAR (.rar) formats. It relies on helper applications to handle those archive formats (for example bzip2 for BZIP2 archives).
Extract files from an archive4. Often one wants to extract all files in an archive to a single subdirectory. However, some archives contain multiple files in their
root directories. The patool program overcomes this problem by first extracting files to a unique (temporary) directory, and then moving its contents back if possible.
This also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake.
The configuration files (see FILES) can specify which program to use for each archive format. Per default a list of programs are searched and the first one will be used
for an archive.
Additionally, default options like verbosity and force overwrite can be configured.
