Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

My fav script to unpack anything, found a few years ago somewhere

      # ex - archive extractor
      # usage: ex <file>
      function ex() {
          if [ -f $1 ] ; then
          case $1 in
              *.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.tar.xz) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
              *.rar) unrar x $1 ;;
              *.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
              *.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
              *.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
              *.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
              *.zip) unzip $1 ;;
              *.Z) uncompress $1;;
              *.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
              *) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via ex()" ;;
          esac
          else
              echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
          fi
      }

`aunpack` does the trick for me.

That's brilliant. Now I need its compressing counterpart.

Very nice and clean

I use dtrx, which also ensures that all files are extracted into a folder.

Now, add inotify and a systemd user service and you would be getting somewhere. Also packaged versions of that exist already.

So, you created a square wheel, instead of a NASA wheel.

`tar xf` autodetects compressed files now. You can replace any of your instances of tar with that.

Yes, but only bsdtar has support for zip, rar, and 7z.