ouch
stands for Obvious Unified Compression Helper and is a CLI tool to help you compress and decompress files of several formats.
- Easy to use.
- Accessibility mode (A11Y) via
--accessibility
orACCESSIBILITY
env var (see wiki page). - Automatic formats detection.
- Same usage syntax for all formats.
- Uses encoding and decoding streams to improve performance.
- No runtime dependencies (for Linux x86_64).
- Can list archive contents with pretty tree formatting.
- Shell completions (soon!).
Use the decompress
subcommand and pass the files.
# Decompress a file
ouch decompress a.zip
# Decompress multiple files
ouch decompress a.zip b.tar.gz c.tar
# Short alternative
ouch d a.zip
The -d/--dir
flag can be used to redirect decompression results to another directory.
# Decompress 'summer_vacation.zip' inside of new folder 'pictures'
ouch decompress summer_vacation.zip --dir pictures
Use the compress
subcommand, pass the files and the output file at the end.
# Compress four files
ouch compress 1 2 3 4 archive.zip
# Short alternative
ouch c file.txt file.zip
ouch
detects the extensions of the output file to decide what formats to use.
Format | .tar |
.zip |
.bz , .bz2 |
.gz |
.lz4 |
.xz , .lzma |
.sz |
.zst |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Supported | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
And the aliases: tgz
, tbz
, tbz2
, tlz4
, txz
, tlzma
, tsz
, tzst
.
Formats can be chained:
.tar.gz
.tar.gz.gz.gz.gz
.tar.gz.gz.gz.gz.zst.xz.bz.lz4
Compiled for x86_64
on Linux, Mac OS and Windows, run with curl
or wget
.
Method | Command |
---|---|
curl | curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ouch-org/ouch/master/install.sh | sh |
wget | wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ouch-org/ouch/master/install.sh -O - | sh |
The script will copy the latest binary to /usr/local/bin
.
Check the wiki guide.
If you installed ouch
using the download script, you will need no dependencies (static MUSL binary).
Otherwise, you'll need these libraries installed on your system:
These are available on all mainstream Linux distributions and on macOS.
Comparison made decompressing linux.tar.gz
and measured with
Hyperfine and the values presented are the average (wall clock) elapsed time.
Tool | ouch |
tar |
bsdtar |
---|---|---|---|
Average time | 911 ms | 1102 ms | 829 ms |
Note: ouch
focuses heavily on usage ergonomics and nice error messages, but
we plan on doing some optimization in the future.
Versions used:
ouch
is made out of voluntary work, contributors are very welcome! No contribution is too small and all contributions are valued.
- Open an issue.
- Package it for your favorite distribution or package manager.
- Open a pull request.
- Share it with a friend!