Mac Commanline Tool For Unarchiving

The solution is to distribute the command line tool on a signed disk image rather than in a zip file. I ended up testing back to 10.11.4 and confirmed that's when the trouble began. (I must have been testing it improperly back then.) OS X simply blocks double-clicking a Unix Command Line Tool, no matter how I sign it.

In addition to its own native format (.7z) it can handle the following extensions: ZIP, gzip, bzip2, tar and, in betas for version 9, xz. It can also decompress (only) in the following formats: ARJ, CAB, CHM, cpio, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. A Windows command line version 7za.exe is included. For other platforms, a POSIX version named p7zip is available from, and some of those ports are also linked from. Unfortunately, the Mac link seems broken, so for OS X, either.

EDIT: For non-Windows versions go to the Downloads page. There you can find the source as well as pre-compiled binaries. For the compression and archiving types that Mac OS X knows natively, you can just use open, and it'll invoke 'Archive Utility' (formerly BOMArchiveHelper), just like double-clicking it from the Finder would have. This works for [pk]zip, gzip, bzip, bzip2, tar, pax, cpio, compress (.Z), etc. If you have apps installed that know how to unarchive other formats, and they have registered for those file extensions or magic(5) values, then the open command will launch those apps to handle those types. Of course you'll probably end up in those apps' GUIs.

Has two command line utilities since version 2.5 according to the website: Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. [.] If you have a compressed file that The Unarchiver does not open, please post a bug on the, and include the file in question, and I will look into whether it is possible to add support for it!

[.] There are now two command-line utilities available, unar and lsar, which can be used to unpack and list archives, respectively. They are still in development and not really feature-complete, but they should work. These are available as precompiled binaries for both OS X and Windows on the, and can also be built on Linux. To download the command line tools (not included in the regular The Unarchiver download!), go to and select unar0.2.zip (works as of September 20, 2010).

For complete specs on a particular system, click the name of the Mac. Systems marked 'Current*' (Current and an asterisk) also are capable of running macOS Mojave, but there may be some unsupported features. For all Macs that are compatible with a specifc maximum supported version of Mac OS X -- courtesy of EveryMac.com's -- click the OS of interest. Systems with 'Current' support the current version of the Mac operating system, macOS Mojave (10.14).

If you happen to use, you can install atool and extract many archive types like so: brew install atool atool -x archive.anything Assuming the corresponding external programs are available on your system, it can handle:.tar.gz,.tgz,.tar.bz,.tbz,.tar.bz2,.tbz2,.tar.Z,.tZ,.tar.lzo,.tzo,.tar.lz,.tlz,.tar.xz,.txz,.tar.7z,.t7z,.tar,.zip,.jar,.war,.rar,.lha,.lzh,.7z,.alz,.ace,.a,.arj,.arc,.rpm,.deb,.cab,.gz,.bz,.bz2,.gz,.bz,.bz2,.Z,.lzma,.lzo,.lz,.xz,.rz,.lrz,.7z,.cpio is a script for managing file archives of various types (tar, tar+gzip, zip etc). The main command is aunpack which extracts files from an archive. Did you ever extract files from an archive, not checking whether the files were located in a subdirectory or in the top directory of the archive, resulting in files scattered all over the place? Aunpack overcomes this problem by first extracting to a new directory. If there was only a single file in the archive, that file is moved to the original directory.

Aunpack also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake. Word 2011 installer for mac. The other commands provided are apack (to create archives), als (to list files in archives), and acat (to extract files to standard out). As atool invokes external programs to handle the archives, not all commands may be supported for a certain type of archives. Atool identifies archives by their file extension.

Sometimes this is not possible - for instance rar archives usually have varying numeric file extensions. In those cases when atool can't identify the format, file is used instead. ( atool can be configured not to use file.).