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Comment by genieyclo | Hacker News Reader

My most used cli tool outside of the default nuts and bolts is dtrx, the best and easiest file extractor for *nix. No more fiddling with flags or looking up, handles issues with putting lots of things in different directories or the wrong permissions on files. It has saved me a ton of time over the years.

http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/

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Wow! Just wow! Bookmarked! A mere upvote is not enough for this! Thank you!!!

Questions:

- Is there a site pointing out amazing command line tools like this? (their existence as opposed to usage examples like at http://www.commandlinefu.com/)

- Is there a site listing the OS X equivalents for Linux command line tools? (e.g. what's the OS X equivalent for dos2unix / flip?)

(edit: merge 2 comments into 1)

Yep, check out http://onethingwell.org which is exactly that. Software (incl cli) that do one thing well, as according to the UNIX philosophy. It's nicely tagged as well, so you can click the 'osx' tag and get tools just for OS X and so forth.

I actually found dtrx on hacker news though a few years ago, but it's also on onethingwell I believe.

Amazing, cheers.

Actually, for extracting tar files, using xf is enough.

    tar xf archive.tar.gz
    tar xf archive.tar.bz2

Still, this will be useful for other formats, I think. Thanks.

Don't you need the z and j flags, respectively? The way you write it works for uncompressed tars.

Did you check? GNU tar will guess based on file suffix.

That's cool, although most of the time when I use tar, it's in a command line like

    curl http://example.com/foo.tar.gz | tar zxf -

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