Tar (Tape Archive) is a popular file archiving format in Linux. It can be used together with gzip (tar.gz) or bzip2 (tar.bz2) for compression. It is the most widely used command-line utility to create compressed archive files (packages, source code, databases and so much more) that can be transferred easily from machine to another or over a network.
How to Download and Extract File Using Wget Command
The example below shows how to download, unpack the latest GeoLite2 Country databases (use by the GeoIP Nginx module) in the current directory.
# wget -c http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz -O - | tar -xz
The wget option -O specifies a file to which the documents are written, and here we use -, meaning it will be written to standard output and piped to tar and the tar flag -x enables extraction of archive files and -z decompresses, compressed archive files created by gzip.
To extract tar files to a specific directory, /etc/nginx/ in this case, include use the -C flag as follows.
Note: If extracting files to a particular directory that requires root permissions, use the sudo command to run tar.
$ sudo wget -c http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz -C /etc/nginx/
Alternatively, you can use the following command, here, the archive file will be downloaded on your system before you can extract it.
$ sudo wget -c http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz && tar -xzf GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz
To extract a compressed archive file to a specific directory, use the following command.
$ sudo wget -c http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz && sudo tar -xzf GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz -C /etc/nginx/
How to Download and Extract File Using cURL Command
Considering the previous example, this is how you can use cURL to download and unpack archives in the current working directory.
$ sudo curl http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz | tar -xz
To extract the file to the different directory while downloading, use the following command.
$ sudo curl http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz | sudo tar -xz -C /etc/nginx/ OR $ sudo curl http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz && sudo tar -xzf GeoLite2-Country.tar.gz -C /etc/nginx/
