Question

I have a script that I need to run on a large number of files with the extension **.tar.gz*.

Instead of uncompressing them and then running the script, I want to be able to uncompress them as I run the command and then work on the uncompressed folder, all with a single command.

I think a pipe is a good solution for this but i haven’t used it before. How would I do this?

Answer 1

The -v orders tar to print filenames as it extracts each file:

tar -xzvf file.tar.gz | xargs -I {} -d\\n myscript "{}"

This way the script will contain commands to deal with a single file, passed as a parameter (thanks to xargs) to your script ($1 in the script context).

Edit: the -I {} -d\\n part will make it work with spaces in filenames.