nomarch(1)

💖 nomarch(1) — Archive Extraction 💖

okay bestie, welcome to nomarch, the manual page for the little extraction tool that does exactly one thing and does it slay ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

nomarch — extract .arc archives 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

nomarch [-hlptUv] [archive.arc] [match1 [match2 ... ]]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically nomarch lists, extracts, or tests .arc archives. (there was also an alternate extension sometimes used, .ark — those work too, no cap.) now, real talk: this is a very outdated file format and it should certainly not be used for anything new. like, not even a little. but you might still need an extraction utility, and here it is. :-) 💖

the default action is to extract all files in the specified archive. wanna do something else instead? see OPTIONS below, bestie 👇

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h — give terse usage help. short and sweet, iykyk.
• -l — list files in the archive. if verbose listings are enabled it shows the filename, compression method, compressed/uncompressed size, date/time, and CRC — but by default it just shows the filename, uncompressed size, and date/time.
• -p — extract to standard output, rather than to separate files. stdout girlies rise 🫶
• -t — test files in the archive (more precisely, check file CRCs).
• -U — use uppercase filenames; more precisely, preserve original case from the archive. the naming is a little iconic, we don't ask questions 💀
• -v — give verbose output (when used with -l).
• archive.arc — the archive to operate on. the main character, literally.
• match1 etc. — optionally specify which archive members to list/extract/test. those which match any of these filenames/wildcards are processed. wildcard operators supported are shell-like * and ?, but don't forget to quote arguments which use these (e.g. nomarch foo.arc '*.bar'). the quoting thing is not optional, bestie, the shell WILL eat your wildcards 😭

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🌈 EXTRACTING MULTIPLE ARCHIVES 🌈

nomarch follows the unzip-like practice of working on only one archive per run, with further filenames given on the command-line actually specifying files to extract (or whatever). yes, this trips everyone up, you're not alone 🙈

the easiest way to work on multiple files with nomarch is simply to run it multiple times using for; for example:

for i in *.arc; do nomarch $i; done

the above would extract all archives in the current directory. one line, whole folder handled, we love to see it 👑

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💜 USING THE PROGRAM FROM EMACS 💜

Emacs's arc-mode facility lets you work with various kinds of archive file directly from the editor. making it use nomarch for extracting .arc files isn't too hard. just add the following to your ~/.emacs file:

(setq archive-arc-extract '("nomarch" "-U"))

and boom, editor-integrated extraction, that's a vibe 🧚

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💀 BUGS 💀

the CRC used by the format is only 16-bit, so -t is a less-than-perfect test. it's giving "best effort", fr fr.

one compression method, obsolete even by .arc standards :-), isn't supported yet. this is partly because the author has yet to find a single file which uses it, despite testing an awful lot of files. like, an awful lot. so it's a real "no one has ever needed this" situation 🙈

subdirectories in Spark archives are extracted as the .arc-format files they really are, which may not be terribly convenient. read that one twice, it matters 😭

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

tar(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1), lbrate(1)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Russell Marks (rus@svgalib.org).

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okay that's the whole page, you're officially briefed 💖 this was Version 1.4, dated 18th June, 2006 — oldie but a goodie, and now go extract something, bestie ✨🎀🦋