Merge and extract tgz files from Google Takeout

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

gnu-tar doesn't seem to support -i shorthand, needs the full --ignore-zeros to work.

@Thinkscape are you sure you're using GNU tar? Because that's the same complaint made earlier about bsdtar, where installing GNU tar was the solution.

My bad. homebrew linking mess got me this time ...

Thanks @paradite unzip \*.zip is all we need for zip archives.