Bjørn Arild Mæland

As you can see in my zsh repository on GitHub, I spend a lot of time playing around with my zsh configuration. I'm going to present some of my favourite tricks here on this blog. Today I'll show a very useful function that handles extraction of files. It serves two purposes: it both abstracts away the specific extraction command and deletes the archive file (if successfully extracted). I call it ed:

# Extract & Delete
ed() {
  case ${1##*.} in
    tar)
      tar -xvf $1
      ;;
    tgz|gz)
      tar -zxvf $1
      ;;
    tbz|tbz2|bz2)
      tar -jxvf $1
      ;;
    zip)
      unzip $1
      ;;
    rar)
      unrar x $1
      ;;
  esac || return 1
  rm $1
}

This allows you to do stuff like ed latest.tar.gz, and it would have the same effect as tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz; rm latest.tar.gz. As you can see, it determines which extraction command to use based on the file extension. I find that I almost always want to delete archive files after I have extracted them, hence the deletion. Hope you'll find it useful as well!

NOTE: In order to make Jekyll handle the # in the title of this post, I had to create a small patch.