catarc

A tool to output archives and compressed files to stdout.

Use cases

• Grep through multiple archives (of different types) without unpacking them.
• Unpack multiple 7z archives to stdout, ignoring errors (7z will choke on corrupted archives).
• Concatenate multiple archived logfiles into one file.
• ...

Installation

pip install catarc

Dependencies

You'll need the following binaries, depending on what kinds of archives you wish to extract:

• tar (.tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz)
• 7zip (.7z)
• gzip (.gz, .tar.gz)
• bzip2 (.bz2, .tar.bz2)
• xz (.xz, .tar.xz)
• unzip (.zip)
• unrar (.rar)

Note that .tar.* types have two dependencies!

Usage

catarc *.7z | grep "something"`

catarc one.zip two.rar three.tar.gz | grep "something"

catarc access.*.gz > access.log.total

Arguments

Optionally, you can use the -s switch to specify a certain filesize requirement for a file to be processed. This specification is in the following format:

>1m,<2g,=3t

You can use any of these combinations, but obviously only one specification per operator. Valid suffixes are k, m, g, t.

Functionality and behaviour

catarc will attempt to unpack the following types:

• .7z
• .tar
• .tar.gz
• .tar.bz2
• .tar.xz
• .gz
• .bz2
• .xz
• .zip
• .rar

When a file is encountered that is none of the above types, catarc will write a warning to stderr and skip the file. If you are missing a dependency, catarc will tell you so.

Bugs

No known bugs. If you find any, please do report them.