Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@rolltidehero

rolltidehero/using-google-takeout.md

Forked from chabala/using-google-takeout.md
Created October 28, 2024 16:22
Show Gist options
  • Save rolltidehero/550bdf6c9edaf530b6b02641793a9cd4 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save rolltidehero/550bdf6c9edaf530b6b02641793a9cd4 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Merge and extract tgz files from Google Takeout
Raw
using-google-takeout.md

Recently found some clowny gist was the top result for 'google takeout multiple tgz', where it was using two bash scripts to extract all the tgz files and then merge them together. Don't do that. Use brace expansion, cat the TGZs, and extract:

$ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-{001..011}.tgz | tar xzivf -

You don't even need to use brace expansion. Globbing will order the files numerically:

$ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-*.tgz | tar xzivf -

tar has been around forever, they didn't design it to need custom scripts to deal with multipart archives. Since it's extracting the combined archive, there's no 'mess of partial directories' to be merged. It just works, as intended.

An additional tip, courtesy of Dmitriy Otstavnov (@bvc3at): if you have pv available, you can track the progress of the extraction:

> pv takeout-* | tar xzif -
 190GiB 2:37:54 [18.9MiB/s] [==============>                                   ] 30% ETA 5:03:49
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment