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 0.1.3
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 into the current folder. This will error if any of the input files are not decompressible.

Decompressing a bunch of files into a folder

$ ouch -i file{1..3}.tar.gz videos.tar.bz2 -o some-folder
# Decompresses file1.tar.gz, file2.tar.gz, file3.tar.gz and videos.tar.bz2 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 folder.

Compressing files

$ ouch -i file{1..20} -o archive.tar
$ ouch -i Videos/ Movies/ -o media.tar.lzma
$ ouch -i src/ Cargo.toml Cargo.lock -o my_project.tar.gz

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.

$ ouch -i file other-file -o files.gz
error: cannot compress multiple files directly to Gzip.
       Try using an intermediate archival method such as Tar.
       Example: filename.tar.gz

Similar errors are shown if the same scenario is applied to .lz/.lzma and .bz/.bz2.

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.

Supported operating systems

ouch should be cross-platform but is currently only tested (and developed) on Linux, on both x64-64 and ARM.

Limitations

ouch does encoding and decoding in-memory, so decompressing very large files with ouch is not advisable.

Contributions

Any contributions and suggestions are welcome!