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Dec 20, 2022 at 13:29 comment added scy won't contribute anymore And, by the way, -f - can probably be omitted altogether, because without -f, tar will read from standard input (or write to standard output, depending on the operation) anyway. So instead of tar -xvf - -i you could also write tar -xvif - and even tar -xvi.
Dec 20, 2022 at 13:26 comment added scy won't contribute anymore @HamsterWithPitchfork: Sounds to me like you’ve typed tar -xvf -i instead of tar -xvf - -i. That’s because -f requires a filename to follow. The special filename - means “standard input”, i.e. whatever is being piped into tar. If you omit that dash, tar will instead interpret the following -i as the file name. That file doesn’t exist, which is why it’s telling you -i: Cannot open: No such file or directory.
Feb 22, 2022 at 18:49 comment added HamsterWithPitchfork This doesn't work on latest ubuntu: tar (child): -i: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: Child returned status 2 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Jan 17, 2021 at 7:35 comment added Baruch to call this syntax easy is a stretch. tar -xf *.tar would be easy (and intuitive)
Dec 29, 2020 at 9:23 comment added Hossein @DanielLe Thanks a lot really appreciate it
Dec 29, 2020 at 8:44 comment added Daniel Le @Rika, tar -f - reads from stdin, hence one needs to pipe the content of the archives, not their names. That's why ls wouldn't work.
Feb 2, 2020 at 3:55 comment added Hossein @polynomial: is there any reason, why we cant use ls instead of cat? wouldnt that work as well?
Dec 6, 2017 at 13:18 comment added Ferroao <For tgz> cat *.tgz | tar -xzvf - -i -C /destination/ <or> for file in *.tgz; do tar -xzvf $file -C /destination/; done
Sep 1, 2011 at 9:40 vote accept scy won't contribute anymore
Sep 1, 2011 at 9:40 comment added scy won't contribute anymore This seemed to work for me. Exact command I used was: cat *.tar.bz2 | tar -ixjv. Thanks!
Aug 31, 2011 at 18:47 history answered polynomial CC BY-SA 3.0