deco application is a generic archive file extractor.

Here are some key features of "deco":

· Consistent command line interface:

· Instead of having to remember e. g.
· tar xjf 1.tar.bz2
· unrar x 2.zip
· flac -d 3.flac
· ar -p 4.deb data.tar.gz | tar xz
· you say
· deco 1.tar.bz2 2.zip 3.flac 4.deb
· and deco extracts them all.

· Consistent behavior:

· Keep or delete archive?
· Some extractors delete the archive after successful extraction, others don't.
· deco keeps the archive after successful extraction, unless you give it the -u ("unlink") option.

· Where to extract
· Some extractors extract in the current working directory, others use the directory the archive resides in.
· deco extracts relative to the current working directory, unless you give it the -a ("absolute") option. See down below for details.

· Quiet / verbose
· Some extractors process the archive verbosely by default and expect you to specify that quiet behavior is wanted. Others do the opposite.
· deco extract quietly, unless you give it the -v ("verbose") option.

· Unknown file extensions
· Some extractors refuse to even try extracting anything with an unknown extension.
· deco can force an extractor to handle a file with any name. Use the -e ("extension") option: deco -e gz myarchive

· Other improvements
· When you extract an archive that contains multiple files at its top level, you usually want them to be placed in a directory of their own. However, if the archive contains only one file or one big directory, that behavior would be annoying.
· The deco extraction algorithm does the right thing automatically: if and only if foo.tar contains multiple files at its top level, a new directory generally called foo/ is created and the archive gets extracted there.
· Also, deco never overwrites files, nor does it need to prompt you for a manual resolution.
· If the file to be extracted is named foo and a file called foo already exists, the new file will be extracted as %foo, and so on.
· Since at the top level only one new file or directory is created (see above), at most this one file will have its name changed like that.
· There are extractors that create files with strange permissions. deco can reset these to sensible defaults implied by your current umask.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· The build system has been updated for BSD users having trouble compiling deco.