unzip (zip, tar, tag.gz) files with ruby

Question

I want do unzip a lot of zip files, is there a module or script that check which format the zip file is and decompress it? this should work on linux, other OSs I don't care for this.

Answer 1

libarchive appears to provide everything you ask for. It currently (2010-04-13) provides the following functionality:

Reading

• gzip compression
• bzip2 compression
• compress/LZW compression
• GNU tar format (including GNU long filenames, long link names, and sparse files)
• Solaris 9 extended tar format (including ACLs)
• Old V7 tar archives
• POSIX ustar
• POSIX pax interchange format
• POSIX octet-oriented cpio
• SVR4 ASCII cpio
• Binary cpio (big-endian or little-endian)
• ISO9660 CD-ROM images (with optional Rockridge extensions)
• ZIP archives (with uncompressed or "deflate" compressed entries)
• GNU and BSD ‘ar’ archives
• ‘mtree’ format (lzma compression not supported)

Writing

• gzip compression
• bzip2 compression
• compress/LZW compression
• POSIX ustar
• POSIX pax interchange format
• "restricted" pax format, which will create ustar archives except for entries that require pax extensions (for long filenames, etc). (ACLs not supported.)
• POSIX octet-oriented cpio
• SVR4 "newc" cpio
• shar archives
• GNU and BSD ‘ar’ archives

_{(A previous version of this answer suggested using Facets, but that project no longer provides ziputils.rb.)}

Answer 2

The easiest way is to probably use Zlib

Zlib is a Ruby library. What follows is a simple program to grab a Zipped file from a particular URL, unzip it, and paste its contents to the screen.

require 'zlib' 
require 'open-uri'

@uri = "www.somedomain.com/filename.gz"
@source = open(uri)
@gz = Zlib::GzipReader.new(@source) 
@result = @gz.read
puts @result

I hope this helps.