How to tar/untar the output on the fly

Question

What is the idiomatic way to do the following

• tar to stdout
• read this tar output from stdout and extract to some other folder.

My solution is tar --to-stdout .. | tar -C somefolder -xvf -

But may be there is more idiomatic way to do it.

Answer 1

The same -f - option works for tarring as well.

tar -cf - something | tar -C somefolder -xvf -

GNU tar uses stdio by default:

tar -c something | tar -C somefolder -xv

---

rsync is also popular.

rsync -av something/ somefolder/