Software I've Always Wanted

[athelind]

I'm something of a fontmonger, as those of you who read my journal may have noticed. I have an extensive hoard of fonts, neatly sorted into directories, with two different freeware font managers to help me keep track of them and install and uninstall them quickly. Like any collector of digital media, every so often, I go on a download binge -- I find a particularly promising font collection, and grab all that I can, until I get bored or they run out of new stuff.

This tends to leave me with large directories full of .ZIP files.

Back in the DOS days, that wasn't a problem. You could just enter "pkunzip d:\source\*.zip > d:\target\" and whirr-whirr-whirr, there you go. All the files, neatly extracted, right where you want them, with only a single command.

Now, of course, we live in the Modern Day, of sophisticated, user-friendly operating systems and applications that eschew the cryptic opacity of the command line in favor of a simple, "intuitive" point-and-click interface that will quickly and easily allow you to do... anything it wants.

Having font-binged last night, I found myself once again with a folder full of several dozen .ZIP files, and the prospect of unzipping them, one after another after another after another -- now, where did I put my wrist brace?

To hell with that, sayeth Your Obedient Serpent, and Google on {batch zip extract}.

ZipALot is exactly what I was looking for: a freeware batch .ZIP extractor.

Now to attack those fontses.

Comments

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Ahh the joys of freeware programs. ^^ Its funny how they often are better than the prime programs they're operating along side.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

in mac OS X Terminal:

tar zxvf *.tgz

or

unzip *.zip

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Or, via hippie GUI:

View as List, sort by kind (all ZIP files will then be grouped) or by date (everything downloaded during the binge will be grouped), click first file of interest, shift-click last file of interest (or, if one had the foresight to download all the fonts into a particular folder, simply go there and "Select All" rather than dealing with this view/group thing), double-click selected group to expand all, or drag-and-drop selected group to a non-default unzip program if so desired.

Takes, like, maybe all of four seconds to set things in motion. No wrist brace required.

[tephra]

Well if you don't know by now to come to me with this sort of thing....

I've been using Unziplify for ages. Right click on the folder of zip files, unziplify, done.

[tikaani.livejournal.com]

I happen to own PKZip Command Line for Win32 ;>