NAME
nomarch - extract ‘.arc’ archives
SYNOPSIS
nomarch [-hlptUv] [archive.arc] [match1 [match2 ... ]]
DESCRIPTION
nomarch lists, extracts, or tests ‘.arc’ archives. (An alternate
extension sometimes used was ‘.ark’; these work too.) This is a very
outdated file format which should certainly not be used for anything
new, but you may still need an extraction utility, and here it is. :-)
The default action is to extract all files in the specified archive;
see OPTIONS below for how to do other things instead.
OPTIONS
-h give terse usage help.
-l list files in 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.
-t test files in archive (more precisely, check file CRCs).
-U use uppercase filenames; more precisely, preserve original case
from archive.
-v give verbose output (when used with ‘-l’).
archive.arc
the archive to operate on.
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’).
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). 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.
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"))
BUGS
The CRC used by the format is only 16-bit, so ‘-t’ is a less-than-
perfect test.
One compression method, obsolete even by ‘.arc’ standards :-), isn’t
supported yet. This is partly because I’ve yet to find a single file
which uses it, despite testing an awful lot of files.
Subdirectories in Spark archives are extracted as the ‘.arc’-format
files they really are, which may not be terribly convenient.
SEE ALSO
tar(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1), lbrate(1)
AUTHOR
Russell Marks (rus@svgalib.org).