ouch (work in progress)

ouch is the Obvious Unified Compression (and decompression) Helper.

How does it work?

ouch infers commands from the extensions of its command-line options.

ouch 0.1.2
Vinícius R. Miguel
ouch is a unified compression & decompression utility

USAGE:
    ouch [OPTIONS] --input <input>...

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Displays this message and exits
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --input <input>...    The input files or directories.
    -o, --output <output>     The output directory or compressed file.

Examples

Decompressing a bunch of files

$ ouch -i file{1..5}.zip another_file.tar.gz yet_another_file.tar.bz

When no output file is supplied, ouch infers that it must decompress all of its input files. This will error if any of the input files are not decompressible.

Decompressing a bunch of files into a folder

$ ouch -i file{1..5}.tar.gz -o some-folder
# Decompresses file1.tar.gz, file2.tar.gz, file3.tar.gz, file4.tar.gz and file5.tar.gz to some-folder
# The folder `ouch` saves to will be created if it doesn't already exist

When the output file is not a compressed file, ouch will check if all input files are decompressible and infer that it must decompress them into the output file.

Compressing files

$ ouch -i file{1..20} -o archive.tar

Error scenarios

No clear decompression algorithm

$ ouch -i some-file -o some-folder
error: file 'some-file' is not decompressible.

ouch cannot infer some-file's compression format since it lacks an extension. Likewise, ouch cannot infer that the output file given is a compressed file, so it shows the user an error.

Installation

Runtime dependencies

ouch depends on a few widespread libraries:

• libbz2
• liblzma

Both should be already installed in any mainstream Linux distribution.

If they're not, then:

• On Debian-based distros

sudo apt install liblzma-dev libbz2-dev

• On Arch-based distros

sudo pacman -S xz bzip2

The last dependency is a recent Rust toolchain. If you don't have one installed, follow the instructions at rustup.rs.

Build process

Once the dependency requirements are met:

• Installing from Crates.io

cargo install ouch

• Cloning and building

git clone https://github.com/vrmiguel/ouch
cargo install --path ouch
# or
cd ouch && cargo run --release

I also recommend stripping the release binary. ouch's release binary (at the time of writing) only takes up a megabyte in space when stripped.