patool is a command-line archive manager that provides a consistent interface for working with many different archive and compression formats.
Its main purpose is to remove the need to remember different commands and options for individual archiving utilities. Instead of learning the syntax of tar, unzip, 7-Zip and numerous other tools, users can perform common archive operations through patool.
The application automatically identifies archive formats using file information, with filename extensions providing a fallback when necessary.
patool handles some formats directly and delegates others to suitable external archiving applications. This allows it to support a particularly broad collection of archive formats without implementing every compression algorithm itself.
The software is useful for shell scripts, automated processing and general file management. It also provides a programming interface so that other applications can use the same archive-handling functionality.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Provides a consistent command-line interface for numerous archive formats.
- Creates, extracts, tests and lists archive contents.
- Searches for text within archives.
- Compares the contents of two archives.
- Repacks archives into different formats.
- Automatically detects archive formats using file content or filename extensions.
- Supports manually specifying the archive format when automatic detection is unsuitable.
- Handles ZIP, TAR, 7z, RAR, CAB, ISO, RPM, DEB and many other formats.
- Supports BZIP3, CHM, FREEARC, UDF and Zstandard archives.
- Provides native handling of TAR, ZIP, BZIP2, LZMA and GZIP formats.
- Can use suitable external applications for additional archive formats.
- Supports password-protected archives when the selected archiving backend provides the necessary functionality.
- Accepts multiple archives for extraction in a single command.
- Allows an extraction destination to be specified.
- Provides verbose reporting for archive operations.
- Offers a Python API for integrating archive management into other applications.
- Uses structured error handling for failed archive operations.
- Supports shell completion through argcomplete.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Website: github.com/wummel/patool
Support:
Developer: Bastian Kleineidam
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Archive Managers | |
|---|---|
| DAR | Disk ARchive: Backup directory tree and files |
| tar | A file archiver and archive format developed since the early days of Unix |
| zpaqfranz | Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests |
| patool | Portable archive file manager |
| 7-Zip | File archiver with a high compression ratio |
| tarlz | Massively parallel combined implementation of tar and lzip |
| TUI Archiver | Terminal application to list / manage archives |
| Simple Archiver | Fairly wide range of features |
| tarnation | Simple, extensible tar backup/restore utility |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Alternatives to tar | |
|---|---|
| TUI Archiver | List / manage archives |
| tarlz | Massively parallel combined implementation of tar and lzip |
| tarnation | Simple, extensible tar backup/restore utility |
| patool | Portable archive file manager that focuses on simplicity |
| zpaqfranz | Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests |
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