Cheese note: I still do the ol' pipe dance when de-compressing archives, like this: gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf - The reason? Well, its like thi

Cheese note: I still do the ol' pipe dance when de-compressing archives, like this: gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf - The reason? Well, its like this: I learned it that way on machines that had, typically, about 4 megs available. So it used to be, back in the ol' days, that if you tried to do it like: tar xvzf somefile.tar.gz .. you'd run out of RAM, get into swapfile sadness, and so on. Piping it through the console first, used the tty-buffers, which blocked whenever exhaustion occurs, but nevertheless: recovered a lot smoother than when heavy swap was involved .. Dunno if its still 'true' (could be a mythos I'm passing on from the old, drunk sysadmin I learned the rule from) but it aways bugs me when I forget to do it 'the new way' ..