atool 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. It overcomes the problem of extracting files from an archive without 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 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. It also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake. The other commands are apack for creating archives, als for listing files in archives, and acat for extracting files to standard out.

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