Downloading and automatically installing a tgz file

Question

#!/bin/bash

mkdir /tmp
curl -O http://www.mucommander.com/download/nightly/mucommander-current.app.tar.gz /tmp/mucommander.tgz
tar -xvzf /tmp/mucommander.tgz */mucommander.app/*
cp -r /tmp/mucommander.app /Applications
rm -r /tmp

I'm trying to create a shell script to download and extract muCommander to my applications directory on a Mac.

I tried cd into the tmp dir, but then the script stops when I do that. I can extract all using the -C argument, but the current tgz path is muCommander-0_9_0/mucommander.app, which could change on later builds, so I'm trying to keep it generic.

Can anyone give me pointers where I'm going wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Strip the first path component when you untar the archive, from tar(1):

 --strip-components count
         (x mode only) Remove the specified number of leading path ele-
         ments.  Pathnames with fewer elements will be silently skipped.
         Note that the pathname is edited after checking inclusion/exclu-
         sion patterns but before security checks.

Update

Here is a working bash example of how to, fairly generically, copy the contents of the tgz file to /Applications.

shopt -s nocaseglob

TMPDIR=/tmp
APP=mucommander
TMPAPPDIR=$TMPDIR/$APP

mkdir -p $TMPAPPDIR

curl -o $TMPDIR/$APP.tgz http://www.mucommander.com/download/nightly/mucommander-current.app.tar.gz
tar --strip-components=1 -xvzf $APP.tgz -C $TMPAPPDIR
mv $TMPAPPDIR/${APP}* /Applications
# rm -rf $TMPAPPDIR $TMPDIR/$APP

The rm command is commented out for now, verify that it does no harm before you use it.

Answer 2

The following will update your muCommander.

#for the safety, remove old temporary extraction from the /tmp
rm -rf /tmp/muCommander.app

#kill the running mucommander - you dont want replace the runnung app
ps -ef | grep ' /Applications/muCommander.app/' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

#download, extract, remove old, move new, open
#each command run only when the previous ended with success
curl http://www.mucommander.com/download/nightly/mucommander-current.app.tar.gz  |\
 tar -xzf - -C /tmp --strip-components=1 '*/muCommander.app' && \
 rm -rf /Applications/muCommander.app && \
 mv /tmp/muCommander.app /Applications && \
 open /Applications/muCommander.app

Beware, after the '\' must following new line, and not any spaces...