[prakashk]

I use atool (http://www.nongnu.org/atool/), which is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu (and I am sure in other distributions as well). It supports all the formats I have encountered so far (tar, tar.gz, zip, rar, bz2 and others).

It provides a few commands, two of which I use the most:

    als - list files in an archive
    aunpack - exatract files from an archive

The best part is aunpack extracts files into a subdirectory (I hate polluting the current directory with files from a new archive which wasn't properly packaged to include a directory), and it does it only when necessary. Before I found it, I always used to create a temp directory, cd to it, unpack into it, and possibly move files around etc.