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)