ouch stands for Obvious Unified Compression Helper.
It's a CLI tool for compressing and decompressing for various formats.
Ouch has three main subcommands:
ouch decompress (alias d)ouch compress (alias c)ouch list (alias l or ls)To see help for a specific command:
sh
ouch help <COMMAND>
ouch <COMMAND> --help # equivalent
Use the decompress subcommand, ouch will detect the extensions automatically.
```sh ouch decompress a.zip
ouch decompress a.zip b.tar.gz c.tar ```
The -d/--dir flag can be used to redirect decompression results to another directory.
```sh
ouch decompress summer_vacation.zip --dir pictures ```
Pass input files to the compress subcommand, add the output file at the end.
```sh
archive.zipouch compress one.txt two.txt archive.zip
ouch compress file.txt file.txt.lz4.zst ```
ouch detects the extensions of the output file to decide what formats to use.
```sh ouch list archive.zip
ouch list source-code.zip --tree ```
Output:
└── src
├── archive
│ ├── mod.rs
│ ├── tar.rs
│ └── zip.rs
├── utils
│ ├── colors.rs
│ ├── formatting.rs
│ ├── mod.rs
│ └── fs.rs
├── commands
│ ├── list.rs
│ ├── compress.rs
│ ├── decompress.rs
│ └── mod.rs
├── accessible.rs
├── error.rs
├── cli.rs
└── main.rs
| Format | .tar | .zip | .gz | .xz, .lzma | .bz, .bz2 | .lz4 | .sz | .zst |
|:---------:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| Supported | ✓ | ✓¹ | ✓² | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓² | ✓ |
✓: Supports compression and decompression.
✓¹: Due to limitations of .zip, it doesn't support streaming (de)compression.
✓²: Supported, and compression runs in parallel.
tar aliases are also supported: tgz, tbz, tbz2, tlz4, txz, tlzma, tsz, tzst.
Formats can be chained:
.zst.gz.tar.gz.gz.tar.gz.gz.gz.zst.xz.bz.lz4If the filename has no extensions, Ouch will try to infer the format by the file signature.
bash
pacman -S ouch
cmd
scoop install ouch
bash
cargo install ouch
Check the releases page.
Check the wiki guide on compiling.
If you installed ouch using the download script, you will need no dependencies (static MUSL binary).
Otherwise, you'll need these libraries installed on your system:
These are available on all mainstream Linux distributions and on macOS.
Benchmark results are available here. Performance of compressing and decompressing Rust source code are measured and compared with Hyperfine. The values presented are the average (wall clock) elapsed time.
Note: ouch focuses heavily on usage ergonomics and nice error messages, but
we plan on doing some optimization in the future.
Versions used:
ouch is made out of voluntary work, contributors are very welcome! No contribution is too small and all contributions are valued.