In Ubuntu you can do "sudo apt-get install unp" to get a very nice tool that can unpack any type of archive. This means that you can type: unp filename.ext without having to worry about the specific compression format use (i.e. ext == ".tgz" or ".bz2" etc etc). unp file1.tgz unp file2.bz2 unp file3.tar.gz ...all of these work well. Please add an "unp" package to fedora as well.
We don't add new software without willing maintainers - we certainly appreciate new maintainers that want to help, though. If you're interested in packaging this software for Fedora, please see the instructions at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join#OS_Developer I've also added this request to the wishlist at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_maintainers_wishlist Closing as DEFERRED until someone picks up the request.
Most up2date references I could find: http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/unp/unp_2.0~pre7+nmu1.tar.bz2 http://sources.debian.net/src/unp/2.0%7Epre7%2Bnmu1/unp
@mnemo: note that there is a handful of utilities with the same purpose, see, e.g., atool (and its aunpack command), which is packaged in Fedora