My blog_title_here

zcat, bzcat, lzcat, xzcat... Arrrgh! Autodetection rocks

Playing with dracut today, noticed that it can create lzma-compressed initrd's without problem, but it's "lsinitrd" script uses zcat to access initrd data, thus failing for lzma or bzip2 compression.

Of course the "problem" is nothing new, and I've bumped against it a zillion times in the past, although it looks like today I was a bit less (or more?) lazy than usual and tried to seek a solution - some *cat tool, which would be able to read any compressed format without the need to specify it explicitly.

Finding nothing of the /usr/bin persuasion, I noticed that there's a fine libarchive project, which can do all sort of magic just for this purpose, alas there seem to be no cli client for it to utilize this magic, so I got around to write my own one.

These few minutes of happy-hacking probably saved me a lot of time in the long run, guess the result may as well be useful to someone else:

#include <archive.h>
#include <archive_entry.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

const int BS = 16384;

int main(int argc, const char **argv) {
    if (argc > 2) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s [file]\n", argv[0]);
        exit(1); }

    struct archive *a = archive_read_new();
    archive_read_support_compression_all(a);
    archive_read_support_format_raw(a);

    int err;
    if (argc == 2) err = archive_read_open_filename(a, argv[1], BS);
    else err = archive_read_open_fd(a, 0, BS);
    if (err != ARCHIVE_OK) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Broken archive (1)\n");
        exit(1); }

    struct archive_entry *ae;
    err = archive_read_next_header(a, &ae);
    if (err != ARCHIVE_OK) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Broken archive (2)\n");
        exit(1); }

    (void) archive_read_data_into_fd(a, 1);

    archive_read_finish(a);
    exit(0);
}

I've also created a project on sourceforge for it, in hopes that it'd save someone like me a bit of time with google-fu, but I doubt I'll add any new features here.