Dtrx – An Intelligent Archive Extraction (tar, zip, cpio, rpm, deb, rar) Tool for Linux

All of us might have faced a situation at some point of time or the other while using Linux tar.gz, tar.bz2, tbz commands. So many archive types, so many commands to remember… Well, not any-more, thanks to dtrx tool.

Dtrx Tool for Extract Tar files

1. 18 Tar Commands to Create and Extract Archives in Linux
2. How to Open, Extract and Create RAR Files in Linux

What is Dtrx?

Dtrx stands for “Do The Right Extraction“, it’s an open source and very effective command-line application for *nix systems that simplify your job of archive extraction easier.

The dtrx command is an replacement of “tar -zxvf” or “tar -xjf” commands and it provides a one single command to extract archives in a number of different formats including tar, zip, rpm, deb, gem, 7z, cpio, rar and many more. It can also used to decompress files compressed with bzip2, gzip etc.

By default, dtrx extract contents to a dedicated directory and also fixes permission issues (like permission denied) faced by user while extracting content to ensure that the owner can read and write all those files.

Dtrx Features

1. Handles many archive types: It provides only one simple command to extract tar, zip, rar, gz, bz2, xz, rpm, deb, gem, self-extracting zip files and many other formats of exe files.
2. Keeps everything organized: It will extract archives into their own dedicated directories.
3. Sane permissions: It also make sure, user can read and write all those files after extraction, keeping permission intact.
4. Recursive extraction: It can find archives inside the archive and extract those too.

How to Install Dtrx in Linux

The dtrx tool is by default included in Ubuntu repositories, all you’ve to do is simple do a apt-get to install in on your system.

On Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-get install dtrx

On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

On Red Hat based systems, dtrx is not available via default repositories, you need to download a dtrx script and install the program system-wide using below commands as root user.

# wget http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/dtrx-7.1.tar.gz
# tar -xvf dtrx-7.1.tar.gz 
# cd dtrx-7.1
# python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

Sample Output

running install
running build
running build_scripts
creating build
creating build/scripts-2.6
copying and adjusting scripts/dtrx -> build/scripts-2.6
changing mode of build/scripts-2.6/dtrx from 644 to 755
running install_scripts
copying build/scripts-2.6/dtrx -> /usr/local/bin
changing mode of /usr/local/bin/dtrx to 755
running install_egg_info
Creating /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/
Writing /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/dtrx-7.1-py2.6.egg-info

How to Use dtrx Command

The dtrx command is sort of like the one ring to rule them all in the Lord of The Rings. Instead of having to remember syntax for each archive, all you have to remember is dtrx command.

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