sax

A simple but smart archiving and extraction tool.

Will automatically detect archive type and extract correctly, you no longer need to look up tar flags.

sax is developed for linux only, I have no interest into testing targets I don't personally use, but feel free to contribute.

sax can create and extract zip, tar, tar.gz, tgz, tar.xz, txz, tar.bz2, tbz2, tar.zst, tzst, and 7z archives. RAR archives can only be extracted.

Installation

From the AUR

Arch users can install the sax-git package with an AUR helper such as yay:

yay -S sax-git

From crates.io

cargo install sax

Usage

Arguments are positional: input(s) come first and the output is always last. When the output is omitted, sax prompts for it.

Extracting archives

sax <archive> <out>

Extracts the contents of an archive into the output directory, creating it if needed.

Archiving files and directories

sax <input>... <archive>

Creates an archive containing one or more input files or directories, creating all required subdirectories.

Configuration

sax stores configuration in ~/.config/sax/config.yaml by default, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sax/config.yaml when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set.

• extract_prefs.strip_top_level_dir: controls whether sax removes a single top-level directory from an archive before extracting into the output directory. Defaults to true.

Optional flags

These flags override configuration settings for a single execution.

• --strip removes a single top-level directory.
• --no-strip keeps a single top-level directory.