Downloading and extracting a .tar to a specific directory

Question

I want to download a tar of a git repo and extract its contents to another folder.

The following line (broken up for clarity) works:

curl -L -0 nt-dotfiles.tar.gz https://api.github.com/repos/nicktomlin/laptop/tarball \
 | tar --strip-components=1 -zx -C ~/Documents/dotfiles

but gives gives this error:

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: nt-dotfiles.tar.gz; nodename nor servname provided, or not known

I'm fine with leaving things as-is (because it still works) but I'm curious about the error, and would feel better if it went away.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your syntax should be: curl -L -o nt-dotfiles.tar.gz https://api. ... You are using a zero instead of lower case 'Oh'. Zero forces curl to use http1.0. 'o' provides an output filename.

From the man page:

-0, --http1.0
          (HTTP)  Forces curl to issue its requests using HTTP 1.0 instead
          of using its internally preferred: HTTP 1.1. 


-o, --output <file>
          Write output to <file> instead of stdout. If you are using {} or
          [] to fetch multiple documents, you can use '#'  followed  by  a
          number  in  the <file> specifier. That variable will be replaced
          with the current string for the URL being fetched. Like in:

            curl http://{one,two}.site.com -o "file_#1.txt"

Answer 2

You may try:

$ curl -s http://example.com/file.tgz | tar xvf - -C dest/