ouch

ouch stands for Obvious Unified Compression Helper. It is a single CLI tool that handles compression and decompression for virtually every common archive format — tar, zip, gz, bz2, xz, zst, 7z, rar, and more — using a clean, consistent interface so you never have to remember the flags for each individual format again.

Features

• Format auto-detection — infers the format from the file extension; no need to specify it explicitly
• Wide format support — tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.xz, tar.zst, zip, gz, bz2, xz, zst, 7z, rar, lz4, lzma, and more
• Consistent interface — the same three subcommands (compress, decompress, list) work for every format
• Smart output naming — automatically names output files based on the input when not specified
• Multiple inputs — compress several files or directories into one archive in a single command
• Progress display — shows progress bars for large archives
• No flags to memorise — the format is determined by the filename, not a -z vs -j vs -J dance

Installation

cargo install ouch

Or via your system package manager:

# Debian / Ubuntu (Debian 13+)
apt install ouch

# Fedora
dnf install ouch

# Arch Linux
pacman -S ouch

# macOS
brew install ouch

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.ouch

Usage

# Compress files into a tar.gz archive
ouch compress src/ README.md project.tar.gz

# Compress into a zip
ouch compress src/ README.md project.zip

# Decompress any archive (format detected automatically)
ouch decompress archive.tar.gz
ouch decompress archive.zip
ouch decompress archive.tar.zst

# Decompress into a specific directory
ouch decompress archive.tar.gz --dir /tmp/output

# List the contents of an archive without extracting
ouch list archive.tar.gz
ouch list archive.zip

# Compress an entire directory as a .zst (fast, modern format)
ouch compress my-project/ my-project.tar.zst

Why not just use tar / gzip / zip?

Each archiving tool has its own flags, its own quirks, and its own mental model. Remembering that tar -xzf decompresses .tar.gz but you need tar -xJf for .tar.xz, unzip for .zip, and 7z x for .7z is tedious and error-prone. ouch replaces all of that with three verbs that work identically regardless of format.