debian man page for nomarch

nomarch(1)							Archive Extraction							nomarch(1)

NAME
       nomarch - extract `.arc' archives

SYNOPSIS
       nomarch [-hlptUv] [archive.arc] [match1 [match2 ... ]]
DESCRIPTION
       nomarch	lists, extracts, or tests `.arc' archives. (An alternate extension sometimes used was `.ark'; these work too.) This is a very out-
       dated file format which should certainly not be used for anything new, but you may still need an extraction utility, and here it is. :-)

       The default action is to extract all files in the specified archive; see OPTIONS below for how to do other things instead.

OPTIONS
       -h     give terse usage help.

       -l     list files in archive. If verbose listings are enabled, it shows the filename,  compression  method,  compressed/uncompressed  size,
	      date/time, and CRC; but by default, it just shows the filename, uncompressed size, and date/time.

       -p     extract to standard output, rather than to separate files.

       -t     test files in archive (more precisely, check file CRCs).

       -U     use uppercase filenames; more precisely, preserve original case from archive.

       -v     give verbose output (when used with `-l').

       archive.arc
	      the archive to operate on.

       match1 etc.
	      optionally  specify  which  archive  members to list/extract/test. Those which match any of these filenames/wildcards are processed.
	      Wildcard operators supported are shell-like `*' and `?', but don't forget to quote arguments which use these (e.g.  `nomarch foo.arc
	      '*.bar'').

EXTRACTING MULTIPLE ARCHIVES
       nomarch	follows the `unzip'-like practice of working on only one archive per run, with further `filenames' given on the command-line actu-
       ally specifying files to extract (or whatever). The easiest way to work on multiple files with nomarch is simply to run it  multiple  times
       using for; for example:

       for i in *.arc; do nomarch $i; done

       The above would extract all archives in the current directory.

USING THE PROGRAM FROM EMACS
       Emacs's	arc-mode  facility lets you work with various kinds of archive file directly from the editor. Making it use nomarch for extracting
       `.arc' files isn't too hard. Just add the following to your ~/.emacs file:

       (setq archive-arc-extract '("nomarch" "-U"))

BUGS
       The CRC used by the format is only 16-bit, so `-t' is a less-than-perfect test.

       One compression method, obsolete even by `.arc' standards :-), isn't supported yet. This is partly because I've yet to find a  single  file
       which uses it, despite testing an awful lot of files.

       Subdirectories in Spark archives are extracted as the `.arc'-format files they really are, which may not be terribly convenient.

SEE ALSO
       tar(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1), lbrate(1)

AUTHOR
       Russell Marks (rus@svgalib.org).

Version 1.4							  18th June, 2006							nomarch(1)