car

README

car

Car was created so I could have a cross platform command-line tool for creating and extracting compressed archives. I use it on various Linux distros and Windows.

About

Car is a cross platform tool for working with compressed archives. While Car's default archive format is tar, Car is not meant to be a replacement for tar and is not necessarily tape/archive focused. Currently, car archives compressed with either gzip or bzip2 are compatible with tar. Car can also use other compression formats and does not support all of the formats that tar does.

Car can also create and extract zip archives. When creating zip archives, other compression formats are not supported.

Car also is a development tool for working on the underlying archiving package, carchivum.

Car supports a some flags but it supporting all the flags that tar does is not a goal. Additional flags may be added in the future.

Compiling

Make sure Go is installed

At this point, no pre-compiled executable is available. One will need to have Go and Git installed in order to compile Car. To install Go, follow the official install instructions. Installing Go using either brew, for Mac users, or your package manager, for Linux users, may or may not work and is not recommended.

If you are on Linux, Go 1.5 can be installed using my Go 1.5 install script. At time of writing, this is the current version of Go. If there are more recent releases either check my Gists for a version of the script that corresponds with that release or modify your copy of the linked script to download the updated version.

Clone, get debendencies, and compile

Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/mohae/car

Switch to the repo directory:

cd /path/to/car/repo

Get the dependencies:

go get -u

Compile

go build

Move the executable to a location in your PATH.

Usage

Create an archive

To create an archive

car create archive-name.tgz path/to/archive

Car, by default will create a gzip'd tar archive.

To create a zip archive:

car create -format=zip archive-name.zip path/to/archive

Commands and flag names may change

Please note the extract and create commands may change until Car 1.0 is released.

Extract an archive

Car will check the specified file to see what format it is in and extract the archive using the appropriate format. Currently, it assumes that any compressed files that aren't in the zip format are tarballs, e.g. a file compressed with gzip contains a tarball.

The destination path is optional. If a destination is specified, the extracted files will be created within the specified destinatino directory, otherwise they will be extracted to the current working directory.

car extract source.tgz [path/to/dest] 

Operations

Most supported operations and their modifiers are not yet supported. These are documented for development purposes. Once car is further along, the status of commands and options support will be documented. Until then, assume nothing is working.

Supported operations:

extract               extract files from an archive
create                create a new archive

Operation modifiers:

create:

Local file selection:

    --exclude-ext=[EXTENSIONS]  exclude files with EXTENSIONS
    --exclude-anchored          exclude patterns match file name start
    --include-ext=[EXTENSIONS]  include files with EXTENSIONS
    --include-anchored          include patterns match file name start

extract: TODO document flags

Not Implemented:

       --exclude=PATTERN           exclude files, given as a PATTERN  
       --include=PATTERN           include files, given as a PATTERN  
   -D, --remove-files              remove files after adding them to the archive  
       --delete-files              alias to -D  
   -k, --keep-old-files            don't replace existing files when extracting  
       --keep-newer-files          don't replace existing files that are newer  
                                   than their archive copies  
       --overwrite                 overwrite existing files when extracting  
       --atime-preserve            don't change access time on dumped files  
   -m, --modification-time         don't extract file modified time  
       --same-owner                try extracting files with the same ownership  
       --no-same-owner             extract files as yourself  
       --numeric-owner             always use numbers for user/group names  
   -p, --same-permissions          extract permissions information  
       --no-same-permissions       do not extract permissions information  
       --preserve-permissions      same as -p  
   -M, --newer-mtime=DATE          only stores files modified since DATE  

    --wildcards                 patterns use wildcards  
    --no-wildcards              patterns do not use wildcards  
    --newer-file=FILENAME       only store files newer than the DATE for  
                                FILENAME

Status

Currently supported functionality:

• tar archives, optionally compressed with:
  • gzip (default)
  • lz4
  • bzip2 (extract only)
• zip archives

Additional functionality will be added as Carchivum functionality expands.

Notes:

• Currently, directories are created with 0744 permission. There may be support for properly setting directory permissions.
• Symlinks are not followed/archived.
• Hidden files and directories are not supported.

Documentation

Overview

Car creates compressed archive; the uncompressed archive is a tar. If a car archive is compressed using a compression format that tar supports, it can be uncompressed using tar. Car can uncompress compressed tarballs that are compressed using a compression format that car supports.

Car can be run on Windows or Linux, depending on either the system on which it was compiled or the GOOS that was targeted during compile. It should work on OSX, but it hasn't been used or tested on it.