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?), 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