tar: Writing to Standard Output

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1 Writing to Standard Output
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1 To write the extracted files to the standard output, instead of creating
1 the files on the file system, use '--to-stdout' ('-O') in conjunction
1 with '--extract' ('--get', '-x').  This option is useful if you are
1 extracting files to send them through a pipe, and do not need to
1 preserve them in the file system.  If you extract multiple members, they
1 appear on standard output concatenated, in the order they are found in
1 the archive.
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1 '--to-stdout'
1 '-O'
1      Writes files to the standard output.  Use only in conjunction with
1      '--extract' ('--get', '-x').  When this option is used, instead of
1      creating the files specified, 'tar' writes the contents of the
1      files extracted to its standard output.  This may be useful if you
1      are only extracting the files in order to send them through a pipe.
1      This option is meaningless with '--list' ('-t').
1 
1    This can be useful, for example, if you have a tar archive containing
1 a big file and don't want to store the file on disk before processing
1 it.  You can use a command like this:
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1      tar -xOzf foo.tgz bigfile | process
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1    or even like this if you want to process the concatenation of the
1 files:
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1      tar -xOzf foo.tgz bigfile1 bigfile2 | process
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1    However, '--to-command' may be more convenient for use with multiple
1 files.  See the next section.
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