Question

I have a tar archive which contains several text files. I would like to write a script to display (stdout) the content of a file without extracting it to the current directory.

Actually I would like to do the same as:

tar tf myArchive.tar folder/someFile.txt
cat folder/someFile.txt
rm -R folder

but without the rm…

I tried this way but it didn’t work:

tar tf myArchive.tar folder/someFile.txt | cat

Thanks

Answer 1

Use x to extract, with f from archive file. Then add also option -O to direct extracted files to standard output.

tar xf myArchive.tar folder/someFile.txt -O