expak: Extract and process resources from Quake-style pak files
expak is a GPLv3-licensed tool to extract and optionally process resources from one or more Quake-style pak files.
The main component delivered by expak installation is a pure Python module, for programmatically working with pak files. The installation also creates a command-line utility for simple resource-extraction operations.
Currently expak is compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, and later 3.x. It has no dependencies outside of the standard Python modules.
The expak module documentation contains examples of using the module. Those examples range from a one-liner for listing pak file contents, up to a complete script for extracting and modifying map files for use on a CTF server.
The quakesounds application makes extensive use of expak.
Prerequisites
It's a Python module and utility, so you need Python! If you don't have Python installed, go get it. The latest stable version of either Python 2 or Python 3 will work. (And if you're already a fan of PyPy, expak works with that too.)
You'll probably also want a Python package manager to help install expak (and other things). If you're going to be running on Windows, you can skip this part by downloading a custom expak installer as described below ... although even on Windows, it can be convenient to have a Python package manager, so you may want to take care of this anyway.
The pip package manager is a fine choice for anyone running Python 2.6 or later. If you don't currently have pip then you can run through the instructions for installing pip and be good to go; it can do many things, but you can ignore all of its complexity for the purposes of installing expak.
Installation
The latest version of expak can always be installed or updated to via the pip package manager, and this is the preferred method:
pip install expak
The easy_install utility can also install expak, if you have setuptools installed but can't or don't want to use pip:
easy_install expak
Finally, if you are on Windows, you could also choose to use an installer program, although the methods above work fine on Windows. Custom expak installers are included in the downloads list for expak at the Python Package Index (PyPI).
If PyPI is down, the above installer commands and links won't work. PyPI has good uptime these days, but if for some reason you do have a problem reaching it, the Windows installers and other forms of distribution files (including source distribution) are mirrored in the releases for the GitHub repo.
Another alternative to relying on PyPI, if you have if you have both pip and git installed, is to install expak directly from GitHub:
pip install git+https://github.com/neogeographica/expak
