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unpkg

a Mac OS X .[m]pkg unarchiver - version 4.5

About

I dislike .pkg files on Mac OS X. I don't like how they can touch any part of the system they want. Many times the installer files are useless anyway; all they do is make sure an app is installed in /Applications, for example, which I can handle myself, thank you very much. So this utility simply unpacks all the files in a package. Very handy, and GNU GPL free too!

Note: Unpkg does not touch you system at all except for the folder where the unpacking takes places. Because it does not move files around in your system (on purpose), you should not use unpkg to install, say, incremental OS X updates. But if you just need to get a kext from that package, for example, then unpkg is exactly what you need.

Features

• Universal Binary, 10.4.11 and above
• super quick, no non-sense unpacking
• easy drag-'n'-drop interface
• extracts both standard packages and metapackages (.mpkg files)
• does not require any passwords (unpack all those archives that want Administrator privileges!)
• unpacks both old-style (10.4 and before) and new-style (10.5 and later) packages, even on 10.4
• automatic unpacking of files to a folder named after the package in the same directory if possible, or the Desktop
• good package detection (unpkg will not try to unpack something that's not a package, and easily handles malformed packages)
• licensed under the GNU GPL
• on GitHub. Clone and fork away!

Downloads

• unpkg-4.5.zip -- 2010-08-26
  • finally: metapackage extraction!
  • new progress bar interface
  • lots of behind-the-scenes changes and fixes
• unpkg-4.0.zip -- 2009-01-16. we skipped 3.0 because it's so much better and different!
  • entirely re-written in Python
  • now works with multiple packages at once
  • also now extracts 10.5-style packages (nested ones, too, and in 10.4 as well!)
  • ripped out CocoaDialog, upgraded to a WebKit-based interface
• unpkg-2.1.zip -- 2006-08-08
  • fixes for possible security holes. Thanks, Cameron!
  • make explicit the fact that this is released under the GNU GPL.
• unpkg-2.0.zip -- 2006-06-14
  • now a Universal Binary!
  • completely new interface: no more text output, but pretty Cocoa dialogs and progress bars
    • dialog boxes instead of text output
    • file selection dialogs if no package is dragged onto unpkg's icon
    • more file selection dialogs if unpkg can't save the file in the chosen location
    • prettier error messages
  
  
• Old release (PowerPC only...if you just absolutely need the outdated and ugly text-only interface): unpkg-1.61.zip -- 2005-06-27

Thanks

• Platypus -- A great program by Sveinbjorn Thordarson that encapsulates unpkg-script very nicely.