Question

I need to untar a multiple-file archive. And I have to use a binary to do the actual writing.

With a single file archive, I’m happy with

tar -Oxvf singlefile.tgz | writer filename

for multiple files, tar has a --to-command option that pipes each file to a specified command. Sounds good but what about the file names?

>tar xvf test.tgz --to-command='writer' 2> /dev/null
tets1
test2
test3

tar seems to output the filenames to its stdout, and I couldn’t find a way to get the filenames within the command.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Did you read the tar man page and the GNU tar documentation ?

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