README
¶
🔥 unpack
A universal archive extractor for Linux.
Detects archive type by file content (magic bytes), not by extension — so it works even on renamed or misnamed files.
Supported formats
| Format | Extension(s) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ZIP | .zip |
|
| TAR | .tar |
|
| GZIP | .gz, .tar.gz, .tgz |
Auto-detects plain file vs tar content |
| BZIP2 | .bz2, .tar.bz2 |
Auto-detects plain file vs tar content |
| XZ | .xz, .tar.xz |
Auto-detects plain file vs tar content |
| ZSTD | .zst, .tar.zst |
Auto-detects plain file vs tar content |
| 7-Zip | .7z |
|
| RAR | .rar |
Requires the unrar binary (see below) |
Installation
From source
git clone https://github.com/penguinshero/unpack.git
cd unpack
go build -o unpack ./cmd/unpack
sudo mv unpack /usr/local/bin/
Using go install
go install github.com/penguinshero/unpack/cmd/unpack@latest
RAR support (optional dependency)
RAR extraction shells out to the system unrar binary, since no reliable pure-Go RAR implementation exists.
sudo apt install unrar # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S unrar # Arch
sudo dnf install unrar # Fedora
If unrar is not installed, all other formats still work — you'll only see an error when extracting a .rar file.
Usage
unpack [file] [flags]
Extract an archive
unpack archive.zip
Extracts into the current directory by default.
Extract to a specific directory
unpack archive.tar.gz -o /path/to/output
Preview contents without extracting
unpack archive.7z -l
Verbose output
unpack archive.rar -o ./out -v
Flags
| Flag | Shorthand | Description |
|---|---|---|
--output |
-o |
Output directory for extracted files (default: .) |
--list |
-l |
List archive contents without extracting |
--verbose |
-v |
Show detected format and extra detail |
--help |
-h |
Show help |
How it works
Instead of trusting the file extension, unpack reads the first bytes of the file and matches them against known magic signatures for each format. This means a .zip file renamed to .txt, or any archive with no extension at all, still gets detected and extracted correctly.
For compressed streams (gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd), unpack also inspects the decompressed content: if it looks like a tar archive, it extracts the full archive structure; otherwise it treats it as a single compressed file and writes out the decompressed result.
Security
- Zip slip / tar slip protection — archive entries containing path traversal sequences (
../) are rejected before writing to disk, preventing extraction outside the target directory.
Roadmap
- Password-protected archive support
- Progress bar for large extractions
- Archive metadata / inspection mode
License
MIT — see LICENSE
Directories