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How do I convert .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 files to .7z files using the command line?

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You might be able to edit this script converting from zip to fit your demands? Also there is an online converter supporting the mentioned formats. – N.N. Jun 26 '11 at 8:52
@N.N.: Thanks for the link... it seems to be what I want, aside from the fact that it requires a temporary directory (which is nontrivial, given that my files are big). I'll give it a try anyhow; thanks. – Mehrdad Jun 26 '11 at 8:57
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I'm pretty sure that you can't avoid writing the files to disk in an uncompressed form. I don't think any useful compression algorithm can do its work without having the whole file to look at. – Lukasa Jun 26 '11 at 10:05
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Update: I missed the 'windows' tag on your question completely.
So, unless you use some unix tools (Cygwin?), this answer is not usable there.
I am expecting cygwin to implement this pipe correctly -- you'll need bash, tar, bzip2 and 7z from the environment.

You can pipe the tar output into a 7z like this,

tar xfj filename.tar.bz2 | 7z a -si filename.7z

and similarly, 

tar xfz filename.tar.gz | 7z a -si filename.7z

This will save you the disk-space for extracted data -- but its not converting inline.
You will still need sufficient space to store the '7z' being created from the tarball.
You can only delete the tarball after the pipe ends.

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