XWIM

Do What I Mean Extractor

xkcd-1168

Continuing the emacs tradition of "Do What I Mean" tools, xwim is replacement for the excellent, but unfortunately unmaintained, dtrx. xwim is a command line tool that targets two problems with archives:

• Command line tools for extracting archives are often archaic and differ considerably between formats
• Inconsiderately packaged archives tend to spill their content over the directory they are extracted to

dtrx is a Python script that sets up the command line and calls appropriate archiving binaries (if installed). In contrast xwim is a compiled binary based directly on archiving libraries, which some may appreciate. It can optionally be statically linked if you want it entirely self-contained.

Usage

Invoking xwim is as simple as:

xwim archive.tar.gz

This will extract the archive to the current folder. If the archive contains a single root folder it is just extracted as is. Otherwise xwim creates a folder named after the archive and extracts the contents there.

xwim /home/user/

This will create an archive in the "platform native" format (zip on windows, tar.gz on unix) in the current working directory. The archive contains a single root folder user and is itself named user.zip or user.tar.gz.

xwim /home/user/file.txt

This will create an archive in the "platform native" format (zip on windows, tar.gz on unix) in the current working directory. The archive contains a single entry file.txt and is itself named file.zip or file.tar.gz.

Examples

Single root folder named after the archive

archive.tar.gz
|
-- archive/
    |
    -- file.txt
    |
    -- file2.txt

xwim will just extract the archive to the current directory.

Multiple files/folders in archive root

archive.tar.gz
|
-- archive/
|    |
|    -- file.txt
| 
-- file2.txt

xwim will create a folder archive in the current directory and extract the archive contents there.

Supported formats

Currently xwim supports tar.gz and zip archives. However, this will rapidly expand to many more formats until a stable release is officially announced.

Take a look Archiver.hpp if you want to help and have some time for testing. Most formats can readily be added if they are supported by libarchive. For other formats you have to add an Archiver implementation.

Install

xwim currently released for Linux only. There are two flavers: statically linked and dynamically linked. The releases can be downloaded from https://git.friedl.net/incubator/xwim/releases and should run on most 64-bit GNU/Linux distributions.

For the dynamically linked version, the following dependencies have to be installed:

• spdlog
• fmt
• libarchive

Windows support is planned for the first stable release. Packaging for various distributions is also planned once xwim stabilizes. Please reach out if you can help.

Build

xwim is built with meson. To compile xwim from source you need:

• meson
• ninja
• GCC or Clang (others may work too) supporting C++17

Additionally you need some libraries installed:

• spdlog
• fmt
• libarchive

# Get the source
git clone https://git.friedl.net/incubator/xwim.git

# Build xwim executable
cd xwim
meson build
cd build
meson compile

# Run executable on the test archive
# This will extract root.tar.gz to 
# the current working directory
src/xwim test/archives/root.tar.gz

Configure

xwim strives to just do the right thing out of the box. Consequently, it does not require any configuration. If you are unhappy with the defaults you can change them though.

Changing the log level

Per default xwim chooses an appropriate log level according to your build type (debug/release builds). If you want to change the verbosity you can set the XWIM_LOGLEVEL environment variable. Valid levels are:

• trace
• debug
• info
• warning
• error
• critical
• off

Contributing

While xwim is still in incubator phase (i.e. before version 1.0) its main repository is hosted on https://git.friedl.net/incubator/xwim with a mirror on https://github.com/arminfriedl/xwim. With the first stable release it will most likely move to GitHub as its main repository.

If you want to contribute, you can either issue a pull request on its Github mirror (will be cherry picked into the main repository) or send patches to dev[at]friedl[dot]net.

If you are interested in a long-term co-maintainership you can also drop me a mail for an account on https://git.friedl.net.

Known Issues

• Parsing filters is unsupported There is a somewhat long standing bug in libarchive. rar files might fail with Parsing filters is unsupported. This is because rar is a proprietary format and libarchive does not implement the full machinery necessary to support rar completely. xwim is all about convenience. If you want to help with supporting rar, please keep in mind that this means we have we want to take the official unrar library if possible. This is also a licensing issue as unrar is proprietary and its license seemingly not GPL compatible.