Extracting archived files
May 19, 2008 by Clair Ching
Filed under Geeky Fun, Questions, laptops
For lack of space, people compress files before copying them or sending them via email. If you guys didn’t talk about the archiving, you might have some headaches especially if you haven’t used Linux before. There are tools like XArchiver and when you’re using Gnome, there’s FileRoller and in KDE you have Ark. These are all graphical ways for you to use the tools like the tar compression and zip compression applications. I haven’t seen a distro without one of these three yet.
For users of Gnome and Kde, you could simply click the file you want to extract. You might have some trouble though if it’s a rar file you need to extract. If that’s the case, you need to download unrar from the repositories first. That or you get it as source then build it.
I also learned recently about the 7zip archived files. I haven’t encountered them myself but there is a Linux tool for compressing and extracting them. P7Zip is the project you need to check out if you have to open some 7zip files for work. Well, if ever you couldn’t use the graphical tools after installing 7zip, there’s an online guide on how to make the compression work for you. It’s called the 7zip Helper.
I hope that helps!
I recently find out there is a 7zip frontend called Q7zip. I haven’t tried it yet, but it is there.
I personally prefer command line versions of the programs. When you have a file of several GBs and thousands of files, the graphical tools are amazingly slow.
The command line versions will not try to get the file index, they’ll just do the job. And is not difficult at all, for unzip you use
unzip x filename.zip
for tar.gz
tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz
for tar.bz2
tar -jxvf filename.tar.bz2
for rar
unrar e filename.rar
and for 7z
7z e filename.7z
Faster and more efficient (no clics, no file browsing, just 3 words written in a cli) than graphical tools
Thanks for the tip. Though of course some people still prefer to have a graphical tool.
Of course, that’s why they exist and why I started my comment writing “I personally prefer”.
Which doesn’t mean I don’t use graphical tools, they are much better than cli utilities when you only want to extract 1 file to a specific folder, for example.
Which unzip program is best for linux?