I often do not store downloaded tarballs on my drive anymore. I found that I would download them, extract them, play with them, and then remove the generated source directory tree, but never the tarball. Periodically, I would then have to go and clean out the tarballs.

Well, I have recently been doing it differently. Presumably, just about anything I want will still be available somewhere on the Internet at a given point in time, so, why store a copy at all? When I download something anymore, I just extract it from the tarball over the Internet. For example, I downloaded Tinymail today, and the way I did it was:

wget -q -O- http://tinymail.org/files/releases/pre-releases/v0.0.7/libtinymail-0.0.7.tar.bz2|tar xvjf -

There is only one problem with doing it this way: While GNU tar knows how to autodetect the format of an archive when it is stored on the local filesystem, it does not appear to be able to do so when getting the archive in from a pipe. I would like to look into whether or not detecting the archive format as tar, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 can be done over a pipe, because it would be very nice to use the same invocation of tar that I would use anyway.

Oh, well. Anyway, it still saves me disk space and cobwebs, so it’s all good.