Hi,
I have a 50gb of file.tar.gz. I cannot untar it on the same machine as the space is very low.
How can I untar the file on some other machine in the same network, without moving the original file to that machine.

Thanks
Kiran

Hi,

AFAIK, you can't.

You could launch the command from the other machine with some directory on that other machine as a target but then you will have to transfer a much heavier load than that of the original file.

So either move the original file on a physical support or through the network, with wget or rsync.

Maybe I am lacking of imagination, so I'd be glad to recognize I was wrong if that's the prize I have to pay to learn something

If you have a sshd running on the machine with the big tar archive and an ssh client on the one you are copying to, then you could do this:

EDIT: Actually it would work the other way as well (ssh client on the machine with the big file and ssh server on the receiving machine):

Don't you just love tar pipes?

EDIT 2: Another option would be to use network shares. Then you could mount the directory containing the big archive on the receiving machine and just do a regular "tar xf file.tar.gz". NFS or SMB/CIFS would be obvious options for this. Alternatively could still use ssh via SshFS/Fuse or perhaps fish:// in a file manager like Dolphin and then use Ark to unpack.

That's a lot of info ruario. Thank you so much. It worked.
[SOLVED]

Cool, thanks for letting me know!

EDIT: Out of interest, tar pipe or remote mount? I'm hoping you used a tar pipe, just because it is more fun and geeky!

Just as an F.Y.I. tar pipes involving BSD tar would let you do really funky stuff like copy the contents of a gzip compressed tar on one machine and convert on the fly to another format, say a xz compressed cpio file.

Why would you ever do this? I don't know, other than because it is awesome that it is even possible.