[ale] Q: How to get minimal bloat while unpacking tarball?

[fletch at phydeaux.org (Mike Fletcher)]

On Mar 28, 2006, at 3:20 PM, Tony Carter wrote:

>> Is there a way to incrementally unpack an archive so the old  
>> contents'
>> space is recovered along the way, or does it sound like
>> there's some other problem here?
>>
>> TIA.
>
> Just a guess..
> I think tar filters the tarball through gunzip first and then works  
> off the
> .tar file. Will the uncompressed tarball on the usb? You might want  
> to try
> working from it.


tar (like all good *NIX programs :) reads from a pipe.  Behind the  
scenes it's basically running gzcat and reading the output of that  
pipe.  You can achieve the same thing the way we used to unpack  
compressed tarballs ( uphill both ways in the snow, of course) before  
the newfangled GNU people put an option into for it:

gunzip < foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -

or

gzcat foo.tar.gz | tar xvf -


Sounds to me like something else is afoot.