curl to stdout and untar a zip to a specific directory

Question

What is the correct way to curl to stdout, then untar (a zip file in that case) to a specific directory?

This failed:

curl URL | tar -x > /path

So I thought of this which also failed:

curl URL | tar -x > /path

Why would you untar a zip file rather than unzipping it? Or is it a gzip file containing a tar archive? gzip and zip are two different things. — DopeGhoti, Jan 30 '18 at 19:53
`unzip` _cannot_ unzip from standard input, as stated in its manual page. You will have to write to a temporary file, `unzip` it, and delete the file. — DopeGhoti, Jan 30 '18 at 19:58
That's why I contemplated `tar`... It's not possible at all with `tar`? I really don't know. — Arcticooling, Jan 30 '18 at 20:04
Oh, crap... Do you know a good fast alternative than? Please share a way if you know one. The ultimate goal is to download, extract, and redirect all in one line, shortest as possible. — Arcticooling, Jan 30 '18 at 20:11
Re. the above duplicate ([How to redirect output of wget as input to unzip?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/2690/86440)), see in particular the `jar` trick. As long as you don’t need to preserve permissions, it should work for you: it can extract from standard input. — Stephen Kitt, Jan 30 '18 at 22:13

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 30 '18 at 20:45

Duplicate of How to redirect output of wget as input to unzip? (wget and curl are interchangeable in this context). Please see this answer. Replicating it here:

wget URL -O path/temp.zip; unzip -d path path/temp.zip; rm path/temp.zip

Replace URL and path accordingly.

1 Answers1