How to download an archive and extract it without saving the archive to disk?

I’d like to download, and extract an archive under a given directory. Here is how I’ve been doing it so far:

wget http://downloads.mysql.com/source/dbt2-0.37.50.3.tar.gz
tar zxf dbt2-0.37.50.3.tar.gz
mv dbt2-0.37.50.3 dbt2

I’d like instead to download and extract the archive on the fly, without having the tar.gz written to the disk. I think this is possible by piping the output of wget to tar, and giving tar a target, but in practice I don’t know how to put the pieces together.

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Answers:

Method 1

Method 2

Method 3

Method 4

Method 5

Answers:

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Method 1

You can do it by telling wget to output its payload to stdout (with the flag -O-) and suppress its own output (with the flag -q):

wget -qO- your_link_here | tar xvz

To specify a target directory:

wget -qO- your_link_here | tar xvz -C /target/directory

If you happen to have GNU tar, you can also rename the output dir:

wget -qO- your_link_here | tar --transform 's/^dbt2-0.37.50.3/dbt2/' -xvz

Method 2

Another option is to use curl which writes to stdout by default:

curl -s some_url | tar xvz -C /tmp

Method 3

This oneliner does the trick:

tar xvzf -C /tmp/ < <(wget -q -O - http://foo.com/myfile.tar.gz)

short explanation:
the right side in the parenthesis is executed first (-q tells wget to do it quietly, -O - is used to write the output to stdout).

Then we create a named pipe using the process substitution operator from Bash <( to create a named pipe.
This way we create a temporary file descriptor and then direct the contents of that descriptor to tar using the < file redirection operator.

Method 4

Named pipe with stdin solution and really mind the flags for tar’s -xvz

tar -xvz -C /tmp/ -f <(wget -q -O - https://github.com/user/repo/release/download/v/v.tar.gz)

Method 5

One liner that handles redirects and can extract tar.bz2 files. Use xzfor extracting gzip files.

curl -L https://downloads.getmonero.org/cli/linux64 | tar xj

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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