Tar Command Help

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1

Is it possible to untar a file so it's size reduces while it uncompresses its contents. I have limited space on my mount point and was wondering if we can untar as a stream in other words the size of tarball reduces as it uncompresses the contents.

Thanks

2

Not that I know of... But what is stopping to leave/put to tar file in a different filesystem?

3

No space on any other filesystem on this host to hold the tarfile.

Thanks

4

Time to do some cleaning up then... If its that full you are living dangerously...

5 
<file.tar.gz gunzip -c | tar xvf -

The gunzip reads from stdin, that is directed from file.tar.gz .
It also can read from a pipe:

ssh -qnx remotehost cat file.tar.gz | gunzip -c | tar xvf -

Without compression:

ssh -qnx remotehost cat file.tar | tar xvf -
6

You want to purge the files from the tar as they're extracted?

You could try listing the files in the tar, then extracting & deleting each one in turn. Something like:

filelist=$(tar -tvf archive.tar)
for file in $filelist
do
   tar -xf archive.tar "$file"
   tar --delete -f archive.tar "$file"
done

(untested, assuming GNU tar)

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