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Comment by kbd | Hacker News Reader

For years and years I've used `dtrx` ("do the right extraction") (https://github.com/dtrx-py/dtrx/). Maybe I should switch to unblob?

It looks like unblob has the right behavior by default that I have to alias for `dtrx`:

    alias dtrx='dtrx --one=inside'

But I'll probably want to create an alias for unblob to change default depth to 1.

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I've been using unp (https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/unp.1.html), which is just a wrapper around standard cli tools for unpacking things (tar, xz, unzip, etc). It seems pretty dated by now, good to see some replacements!

If you’re looking for a general-purpose extractor for known, common archive formats, bsdtar is really nice these days; it’s libarchive-based and does way more than just tarballs (extracts zip, rar, and 7z as well as all the common compression formats on top of tar plus a bunch of others).

Not really in the same class of tools as unblob, but handy to have around regardless.

apack/aunpack from the atool suite for me [0]. Funny how many solutions exist for this problem. Though I think Unblob is aiming more for binwalk's niche [1].

[0] https://www.nongnu.org/atool/

[1] https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk

The atool suite is great but only supports well formatted files. The idea with unblob is to precisely identify valid chunks of data within arbitrary files, carve them out, then decompress/extrat/convert them. You would not believe how many embedded devices vendors custom formats is just a loose aggregation of almost standard archive and compression packed up in a single file :D

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