(no subject)

[Dean Kopesky]

Greetings,

I spotted the attached section regarding "Writing to Standard Output" in your
GNU tar manual at:
        http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/html_mono/tar.html#SEC61

I can answer the last question ("Why would you want to do such a thing...?"):

We have archives containing some small files and some big ones.  We don't want
to have to extract the big ones to disk to process them.  Thus, we'd like to
be able to do something like:
        tar xf tarfile.tar.gz -z -O bigfile | process

It was that need that got me looking at GNU tar in the first place.  (So
please don't decide the functionality is useless and remove it. :-)

Thanks much!

-Dean

> Writing to Standard Output
> 
> To write the extracted files to the standard output, instead of
> creating the files on the file system, use --to-stdout (-O) in
> conjunction with --extract (--get, -x). This option is useful if you
> are extracting files to send them through a pipe, and do not need to
> preserve them in the file system. If you extract multiple members, they
> appear on standard output concatenated, in the order they are found in
> the archive.
> 
> --to-stdout
> -O      Writes files to the standard output. Used in conjunction with
> --extract (--get, -x). Extract files to standard output. When this
> option is used, instead of creating the files specified, tar writes the
> contents of the files extracted to its standard output. This may be
> useful if you are only extracting the files in order to send them
> through a pipe. This option is meaningless with --list (-t).
> 
> @FIXME{Why would you want to do such a thing, how are files separated
> on the standard output? is this useful with more that one file? Are
> pipes the real reason?}


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Dean Kopesky                           address@hidden
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