Hi all,

I’m trying to put a command together to download a bz2 archive containing an img file and decompress it immediately, basically without saving it to the filesystem. Can this be done?

This is what I’ve come up with so far, but it’s incomplete: wget -qO- “https://opnsense.com/.../img.bz2” | bzip2 -dv

Background: Trying to install OPNsense on Linode. Their hacky official guide says the best way to install FreeBSD is via the rescue mode. But FreeBSD posts their images as .img, so the filesystem size limitation of 1GB for the rescue image isn’t an issue. But with OPNsense I need to decompress it.

I have a few different options on how to install this but I see it as a good reason to learn more about stdin/out, piping commands, etc.

Thanks in advance.

  • @Im_oldEnglish
    0•4 months ago

    I feel you need to save the whole file before bzip2 can open it (for decompression). Compression/decompression is done in patterns, so it can’t decompress if it doesn’t get the data to inflate.