extract

I'm not too sure where this one comes from, but I found it whilst working with Lorenzo at work. extract is a general purpose tool for uncompressing archives. No longer will you have to remember that it's tar xzf to extract file.tar.gz, or just gunzip for file.gz, whilst it's tar xjf for file.tar.bz2. Just type extract <file> and it'll take care of the rest.

bash
extract () {
if [ -f $1 ] ; then
  case $1 in
    *.tar.bz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
    *.tar.gz) tar xzf $1 ;;
    *.bz2) bunzip2 $1 ;;
    *.rar) unrar e $1 ;;
    *.gz) gunzip $1 ;;
    *.tar) tar xf $1 ;;
    *.tbz2) tar xjf $1 ;;
    *.tgz) tar xzf $1 ;;
    *.zip) unzip "$1" ;;
    *.Z) uncompress $1 ;;
    *.7z) 7z x $1 ;;
    *) echo "'$1' cannot be extracted via extract()" ;;
  esac
else
  echo "'$1' is not a valid file"
fi
}