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
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), LZIP
(.lz), LZOP (.lzo), LZMA (.lzma), RAR (.rar) and XZ (.xz) formats. It relies on helper applications to handle those archive formats (for example bzip2 for BZIP2 ar‐
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.