Ouch!

ouch loosely stands for Obvious Unified Compression (ᵃⁿᵈ ᵈᵉᶜᵒᵐᵖʳᵉˢˢᶦᵒⁿ) Helper and aims to be an easy and intuitive way of compressing and decompressing files on the command-line.

• Usage
  • Decompressing files
  • Compressing files/directories
  • Listing files
• Supported Formats
• Installation
• Supported operating systems

Note

• This README represents the new, but not yet implemented, interface that ouch will use.
• For current usage instructions, check the old README.

Usage

ouch uses the file extensions to infer the file formats.

For example, ouch compress a b c.zip tells to compress a and b into the same c.zip compressed file.

Decompressing files

To decompress, just call ouch passing the input files.

Use the -o, --output flag to redirect the output to a folder.

# Decompress `a.zip`
ouch a.zip

# Decompress multiple files
ouch a.zip b.tar.gz

# Decompress multiple files, but inside new_folder
ouch a.zip b.tar.gz -o new_folder

Compressing files and directories

The compress subcommand accepts files and folders where the last one is the desired output file.

# Compress four files into `archive.zip`
ouch compress a b c d archive.zip

# Compress three files into `.tar.bz2` archive
ouch compress a.mp4 b.jpg c.png files.tar.bz2

# Compress a folder and a file into `videos.tar.xz`
ouch compress Videos/ funny_meme.mp4 videos.tar.xz

Listing the elements of an archive

(TODO -- not implemented at all)

# Shows the files contained in videos.tar.xz
ouch list videos.tar.xz
1. .....

Supported formats

	.tar	.zip	.tar.*¹	.zip.*²	.bz, .bz2	.gz	.xz, .lz, .lzma	.7z
Decompression	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗
Compression	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗

Note: .tar.*¹: .tar.gz, .tar.bz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tar.lz, .tar.lzma, .tar.zip
      .zip.*²: .zip.gz, .zip.bz, .zip.bz2, .zip.xz, .zip.lz, .zip.lzma, .zip.zip

Installation

Getting a pre-compiled binary

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vrmiguel/ouch/master/install.sh | bash

Building

A recent [Rust] toolchain is needed to build ouch. Go to rustup.rs to get it.

Once Cargo is installed, run:

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

Supported operating systems

ouch runs on Linux, macOS and Windows 10. Binaries are available on our Releases page. Binaries are also available at the end of each (successful) GitHub Actions run.

Note on Windows: colors are currently messed up on PowerShell but work fine on ConEmu. A feature for disabling colors is planned.

Limitations

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