tarcat

Note: 'tarcat' is an idiom, not a standalone command.

The common usage pattern involves piping a tar archive stream to tar for processing:
cat [SOURCE_FILE] | tar [TAR_OPTIONS] -

Or from another command's output:
curl [URL] | tar [TAR_OPTIONS] -

SOURCE_FILE
    The path to the tar archive file to be streamed by cat. If omitted, cat reads from standard input.

TAR_OPTIONS
    Options passed to the tar command, such as -x for extraction, -c for creation, -t for listing contents, and -v for verbose output. The -f - option tells tar to read from standard input.

-
    A mandatory argument for tar when reading from or writing to standard input/output.

The term "tarcat" is not a standalone Linux command but rather a common idiom or pattern referring to the act of piping the output of the cat command (or any command that outputs an archive stream) directly into the tar command. This powerful technique allows for efficient processing of tar archives that are not necessarily stored as local files. It's frequently employed for tasks such as extracting archives downloaded from the internet, processing concatenated tar archives, or handling archives generated on-the-fly without intermediate disk storage. Essentially, it leverages standard input/output (stdin/stdout) to enable seamless streaming of archive data between different utilities, making it a cornerstone for advanced shell scripting and data manipulation in Linux environments.

'Tarcat' is not a standard executable: There is no single 'tarcat' binary or command shipped with typical Linux distributions. It is a conceptual term.

Dependency on underlying commands: Its functionality relies entirely on the correct usage and capabilities of the cat, tar, and other piping commands.

Error Handling: Debugging issues in a piped command can be more complex than with single-command operations, as errors from either side of the pipe might not always be immediately clear in their origin.

Performance: While efficient for streaming, performance can be bottlenecked by either the producer (e.g., cat or network speed) or the consumer (tar's processing speed).

Extracting remote archives: curl http://example.com/archive.tar.gz | tar -xzf -

Concatenating tar archives: cat part1.tar part2.tar | tar -xf -

Creating archives on-the-fly to remote: tar -cf - my_directory/ | ssh user@remote 'cat > archive.tar'

The concept behind "tarcat" (piping commands) is fundamental to the Unix philosophy, which emphasizes small, single-purpose tools connected by pipes. This approach dates back to the early days of Unix development in the 1970s. While the specific term "tarcat" may be a more modern colloquialism, the practice of streaming tar archives via cat and pipes has been a common and powerful technique for decades, evolving as network speeds and data volumes increased, making efficient on-the-fly processing indispensable.

cat(1), tar(1), pipe(7), dd(1), gzip(1), bzip2(1), xz(1)