Archive tools

• Arch wiki: Archiving and compression

Convenience tools

• Arch wiki: Convenience tools
• From all tools listed, only ouch and patool are actively maintained

ouch

• GitHub
• Rust
• No Debian package so far

Install:

sudo pacman -S ouch

Usage:

ouch decompress file.xz

Dedicated tools

Tar

Tar preserves ownership and permissions by default when archiving. To preserve ownership and permissions when extracting root is needed. The dedicated extraction flags to preserve ownership and permissions (--same-owner, -p) are enabled by default when using root, so they don't need to be set when extracting as root.

tar -czvf file.tgz file1 file2 ...
tar --same-owner -p -xvf file.tar  # `--same-owner -p` can be omitted as root