cmprss#

Status: Pre-alpha. Lacks formal testing. CLI is reasonably stable but still being tweaked.

A compression multi-tool for the CLI. Replace tar with something you can remember. Relevant XKCD.

Usage#

The primary goal of the CLI is to make it easy and consistent to work with any compression format. All of the examples will work with any of the supported compression formats. Some formats will fail in certain scenarios, as they don't support certain types of input/output; for example tar is unable to support compressing from stdin and extracting to stdout.

All commands read from left to right, input is always either piped from stdin or the first filename specified, and output is either stdout or the next filename (the first if using stdin, the second if using a filename for input).

If output filenames are left out, cmprss will try to infer the filename based on the compression type.

Examples#

Compress a file/directory to a tar archive:

cmprss tar filename
cmprss tar filename my_preferred_output_name.tar

Extract a tar archive:

cmprss tar --extract filename.tar
cmprss tar --extract filename.tar custom_output_directory

cmprss will detect if stdin or stdout is a pipe, and use those for I/O.

Create and extract a tar.gz archive with pipes:

cmprss tar directory_name | cmprss gzip > directory.tar.gz
cmprss gzip --extract directory.tar.gz | cmprss tar --extract new_directory

Supported formats#

• gzip
• tar

TODO: Add more compression algos now that the internal API is mostly stable.