930
the fear of missing out a better compression
(lemmy.world)
I use Arch btw
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I download and then tar. Curl pipes are scary
They really, really aren’t. Let’s take a look at this command together:
Sorry the formatting's a bit messy, Lemmy's not having a good day today
This command will start to extract the tar file while it is being downloaded, saving both time (since you don’t have to wait for the entire file to finish downloading before you start the extraction) and disk space (since you don’t have to store the .tar file on disk, even temporarily).
Let’s break down what these scary-looking command line flags do. They aren’t so scary once you get used to them, though. We’re not scared of the command line. What are we, Windows users?
You may have noticed also that in the first command I showed, I didn’t put a - in front of the arguments to tar. This is because the tar command is so old that it takes its arguments BSD style, and will interpret its first argument as a set of flags regardless of whether there’s a dash in front of them or not. tar -xz and tar xz are exactly equivalent. tar does not care.
Thanks for the explanation, I might use more pipes now. Is it correct, that tar will restore the files in the tarball in the current directory?
Yes. You can specify
tar -C somedir
if you want it to extract them somewhere else.As a rule of thumb, I always extract my tarballs in a newly created, empty directory, just in case whoever packed it didn't put all its files in a subdir
It's not scary from the flags, but rather what is inside the tar/zip.