Extracting multiple files at once about pixz

[vasi]

If I understand what you're asking, I think this already works. Eg, on a tarball containing the pixz sources, I can extract three separate files in one pass, with:

pixz -x -i test.tar.pxz src/read.c src/cpu.c README.md | tar xv

Is that what you're trying to accomplish?

[isarandi]

Yes, thanks, that's great. I think the man page could be clearer about this, it looked like only one path can be passed. Though, the order in your example is confusing, I would expect the three files you want to retrieve to come after the -x directly.

The current man page says:

       -x PATH
           Extract certain members from an archive, quickly. All members whose
           path begins with PATH will be extracted.

Something like this would be more explicit (though, I'm not sure about the man page convention for variable count arguments):

       -x PATH1 [PATH2...]
           Extract certain members from an archive, quickly. All members whose
           path begins with any of the listed paths will be extracted.