atool is a perl script for managing file archives of various types:
tar, tar+gzip, zip, etc.

The main command is aunpack, which extracts files from an archive.
Did you ever extract files from an archive, not checking whether
the files were located in a subdirectory or in the top directory
of the archive, resulting in files scattered all over the place?
aunpack overcomes this problem, by first extracting to a new directory,
and if there was only a single file in the archive, moving that file
to the original directory.
aunpack also prevents local files from being overwritten by mistake.

The other commands provided are:
apack (to create archives),
als (to list files in archives), and
acat (to extract files to standard out).