DTRX, The easiest and simplest CLI archive tool for Linux

While the statement "The easiest and simplest CLI archive tool for Linux" is my opinion, I think you will agree with me when you use it yourself.

I harbor no ill will toward "tar — The GNU version of the tar archiving utility", but tar wasn't designed to be super easy/simple, it was designed to be very powerful, and it is.

In defense of tar, it's been around since version 7 of AT&T Unix.

DTRX takes the next step, keeping the power of tar, but making it much simpler and easier.

Here is a great example from http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/:

"$ dtrx linux-3.0.1.tar.bz2
That's basically the same thing as:

$ tar -jxf linux-3.0.1.tar.bz2
But there's more to it than that. You know those really annoying files that don't put everything in a dedicated directory, and have the permissions all wrong?

$ tar -zvxf random-tarball.tar.gz
foo
bar
data/
data/text
$ cd data/
cd: permission denied: data
dtrx takes care of all those problems for you, too:

$ dtrx random-tarball.tar.gz
$ cd random-tarball/data
$ cat text
This all works properly.

dtrx is simple and powerful. Just use the same command for all your archive files, and they'll never frustrate you again."

Features from http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/:

"Handles many archive types: You only need to remember one simple command to extract tar, zip, cpio, deb, rpm, gem, 7z, cab, lzh, rar, gz, bz2, lzma, xz, and many kinds of exe files, including Microsoft Cabinet archives, InstallShield archives, and self-extracting zip files.

If they have any extra compression, like tar.bz2 files, dtrx will take care of that for you, too.

Keeps everything organized: dtrx will make sure that archives are extracted into their own dedicated directories.

Sane permissions: dtrx makes sure you can read and write all the files you just extracted, while leaving the rest of the permissions intact.

Recursive extraction: dtrx can find archives inside the archive and extract those too.
Download

Support for LZH archives."

For me, installation was a breeze. I run Xubuntu 12.04.

I just ran sudo apt-get install dtrx in my terminal emulator. (Like gnome terminal, or terminator.)

You can also install DTRX from the software center or synaptic.

For more information, you guessed it, go to http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/.