debian man page for unp

unp(1)							      General Commands Manual							    unp(1)

NAME
       unp - a shell frontend for uncompressing/unpacking tools

SYNOPSIS
       unp [-u] file [ files ... ] [ -- backend args ...  ] ucat file [ files ... ]

       unp  is	a  small  script with only one goal: Extract as many archives as possible, of any kind and from any path to the current directory,
       preserving the subdirectory structure where needed. Is a Do-What-I-Want utility and helps  managing  several  extraction  programs  without
       looking for needed options for the particular tool or worrying about the installation of the needed program.

       Run unp without arguments to see the list of supported archive formats.

       The  special  version  ucat  acts  as  wrapper  for commands that can output the extracted data to standard output, like bzip (bzcat), gzip
       (zcat), tar, zip and others.

USAGE
       unp extracts one or more files given as arguments on the command line.  Additionally, it may pass some options to the backend  tools  (like
       tar options) when they are appended after `--'.

       There  is  also	a special option (-u) which is very useful for extracting Debian packages. Using -u, unp extracts the package (i.e. the ar
       archive) first, then extracts data.tar.gz in the current directory and then control.tar.gz in control/<filename>/.

NOTES
       unp will try to decompress into a FILE.unp if it get trouble with existing files. But don't count on this feature,  always  look  for  free
       working space before using unp.

       Unlike gunzip, which decompresses the file in the target directory of the source file, unp uses the current directory for output.

AUTHOR
       Development started by Andre Karwath <andre.karwath@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de>
       Now maintained and packaged for Debian by Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org>

								    18 Feb 2001 							    unp(1)