Tartlet

What is it?

Tar horror stories. Everyone has one. You used the wrong flags and accidentally overwrote one of your source files without a backup. Or you extracted a tarball over your current directory and deleted half the updates to your project. You spent 30 minutes scouring Google for the right set of flags to extract a zipped tarball instead of an unzipped one. Why are there so many flags!?!

Enter Tartlet. Tartlet is a small commandline wrapper around tar that handles the obnoxious flags for you. Need to extract an archive?

tartlet extract thinmints.tar.gz

Mmmmmmm. Delicious extracted cookies. Need to compress a set of files?

tartlet compress butter sugar flour --output cookie

Mmmmmmmmm. Chocolaty compressed cookies. Tartlet makes it easy to make archives (and apparently I'm craving cookies- please hold).

How to Install

Tartlet is conveniently wrapped up in a gem for you (so you don't have to use tar to open up its tarball) and can be installed via rubygems:

$ gem install tartlet

How to Use it

Tartlet takes a command and then a list of files, with optional flags thrown anywhere.

Commands

• compress - takes a list of files, and by default compresses them into gzipped tarball archive.tar.gz

  ex:

  $ tartlet compress foo bar baz
  

  TODO: do a clobbering check before making the tarball to ensure file safety

• extract - takes a single zipped tarball and extracts it into the current directory

  ex:

  $ tartlet extract archive.tar.gz
  

  TODO: take a list of tarballs and extract them each into their own folder

  TODO: do a clobbering check before extracting the tarball to ensure file safety

Options

Options can be placed anywhere in the command, eg. tartlet -d compress -o target file1 file2 is the same as tartlet compress file1 file2 -d -o target which is the same as tartlet compress -d file1 -o target file2. I prefer to put -d before the command, -t after the command but before the files, and -o at the very end, but put them in whatever order makes sense to you.

• -o VALUE, --output VALUE - instead of using the default output (archive.tar.gz or the current directory), direct output to VALUE. For compression archive name, tartlet will automatically append the proper file suffix (.tar or .tar.gz) if it is not already provided.

  ex:

  # extract contents of archive into folder 'dirname'
  $ tartlet extract archive.tar.gz -o dirname
  
  # compress list of files into tarball 'files.tar.gz'
  $ tartlet compress foo bar baz -o files.tar.gz
  -- or --
  $ tartlet compress foo bar baz -o files
  

• --tarball, -tar, or -t - treat tarball as not-gzipped, e.g. archive.tar (vs the default assumption of a gzipped tarball, eg archive.tar.gz

  ex:

  # extract contents of archive into current directory
  $ tartlet extract --tarball archive.tar
  
  # compress files into non-zipped tarball
  $ tartlet compress --tarball foo bar baz
  

• --dry-run, --dry, -d - don't execute any commands, simply print to stdout the tar command that would be produced by tartlet

  ex:

  $ tartlet --dry compress foo bar baz --tarball -o files
  tar -cf files.tar foo bar baz
  
  $ tartlet extract --dry-run lotsoffiles.tar.gz -o safefolder
  tar -xzf lotsoffiles.tar.gz -C safefolder