[Tutor] pipes, lots of 'em

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 10:39:44PM -0800, Daniel Yoo wrote:
> 
> Hmmm... don't know about the pipes thing, but I did find a module that
> will let you read tar archives:
> 
>     http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/4395
> 
> Haven't played around with it yet though.
> 
> I'm very surprised not to easily find a full tar program for Python
> though; perhaps someone else can verify this?

I am not surprised, there are no C libs either.  tar seems to only be spoken
by tar.  But even if I had a tar module, I also need ar support.  So, I am
still dealing with pipes.

ar p foo.ar bar|tar xfO - baz

is the basic command line I need.  This get bar out of the ar formatted foo.ar
and sends it to tar which extracts baz.  I want to be able to parse baz
without it getting written to disk.  My attempts at this have failed for the
most part.