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Last active April 27, 2024 08:03
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Merge and extract tgz files from Google Takeout
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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
@johannesunana
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johannesunana commented Jul 17, 2023 •
edited

Thank you @chabala and @bvc3at! This worked for me on Windows 10 using Ubuntu on WSL. Glad I saw this as the top result.

@chabala
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chabala commented Oct 25, 2023 •
edited

gist comments are not a Q&A forum. If you have unix questions, ask them on StackOverflow.

@dturner
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dturner commented Apr 25, 2024

@paradite Worked perfectly for zip files on MacOS - thank you!

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