On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 collver1@comcast.net wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 11:15:47AM +0900, henry nelson wrote:
> > My notes from when I first started Unix 8 or so years ago have
> >     gzip -dc somearchive.tar.gz | tar xf -
	...
> > Or is it all personal preference?

I don't think it's 100% personal perference.

In the above example, you know for certain that you're avoiding
creating a file "somearchive.tar", which could fill a nearly-full
or smallish filesystem.

This consideration isn't as important on newer systems with multi-gigabyte
disks and filesystems, but NetBSD runs on some elderly systems that either
don't have or can't handle multi-gigabyte filesystems.

I've certainly gotten bitten by nearly filling a filesystem with an un-
compressed or un-zipped .tar file, and then not extracting all of the
.tar file's contents due to having filled the disk along the way.