trunc
Unpack archives bigger than your free space
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trunc - Unpack archives bigger than your free space

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trunc extracts archives and deletes them as it goes, so you only need room for the files, not the files plus the archive. A 3.3 GB ZIP that needs 8.4 GB of disk with 7-Zip takes 5.3 GB with trunc. It works on ZIP, tar (.gz, .bz2, .xz, .zst), ISO and split archives, and is safe to interrupt: trunc resume picks up after a crash or a full disk. It also packs folders into its own .trnc format, built to be extracted this way from the start. Free and open source, Windows and Linux.

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Hey Product Hunt, I made trunc. I kept running out of disk space unpacking big archives. A 40 GB archive with 60 GB free should fit, but every extractor keeps the whole archive until it's done, so you need room for both. trunc deletes the archive while it extracts. ZIP, ISO and tar files are cut from the end once the files stored there are on disk. Compressed tarballs (.gz, .bz2, .xz, .zst) give space back every 64 MiB as they're decoded. Since it's deleting the input, it's built so a crash can't lose anything: nothing is freed until the files it held are verified and on disk, and "trunc resume" picks up after a crash, a kill or a full disk. "trunc plan" tells you up front how much space you need. It's a command-line tool for Windows and Linux, free and open source. Install with cargo install trunc-cli, or the one-line installers on GitHub. Limits worth knowing: freeing space mid-file needs NTFS, ext4, XFS, btrfs or ZFS; don't use it in cloud-synced folders; macOS is untested. I'd like to hear which archive formats or setups you'd want it to handle next.