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)