Use one of the following commands to download and extract (untar) [tar], [tar.gz] or [tar.bz2] files “on fly”, without saving archive themselves.
- No temporary files;
- No Extra output;
- Minimal file space and memory usage.
The following methods are most fast and compact for downloading and unpacking archives.
Download and Extract Archives with WGET
$ wget http://example.com/archive.tar -O - | tar -x $ wget http://example.com/archive.tar.gz -O - | tar -xz $ wget http://example.com/archive.tar.bz2 -O - | tar -xj
Download and Extract Archives with CURL
$ curl http://example.com/archive.tar | tar -x $ curl http://example.com/archive.tar.gz | tar -xz $ curl http://example.com/archive.tar.bz2 | tar -xj
Option | Description |
---|---|
-x | extract files from an archive |
-z | decompress the contents of the compressed archive created by gzip program [tar.gz] |
-j | decompress the contents of the compressed archive created by bzip2 program [tar.bz2] |
I faced with the following issue:
]# wget -O – https://pocoproject.org/releases/poco-1.9.0/poco-1.9.0.tar.bz2 –no-check-certificate | tar -xj
tar (grandchild): bzip2: Cannot exec: No such file or directory
tar (grandchild): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
https://pocoproject.org/releases/poco-1.9.0/poco-1.9.0.tar.bz2
Length: 2635609 (2.5M) [application/x-bzip2]
Saving to: ‘STDOUT’
0% [ ] 0 –.-K/s tar: Child died with signal 13
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
0% [ ] 16,384 102KB/s in 0.2s
Cannot write to ‘-’ (Success).
OS is RHEL 7.3
One important point: These hints are all for GNU tar. If you’re on MacOS or some BSD, you may get a nasty surprise to see that they don’t support the same arguments. With some formats (gzip, bzip2), the local `tar` program might support it, but in other cases (xz) it might not.
The .tar.xz extension that can be decompressed with `tar -xJ`.