I am wondering whether I can incrementally delete the contents of an archive (at a minimum .tar, though ideally also .tar.xz or similar) as I am extracting them all. The ultimate goal is to remove the necessity to have twice the space required for the files available while downloading and extracting.
I have looked around a bit, and it seems tar has a --remove-files option, which is compatible with archiving, but this only seems to work when creating an archive. The --delete option seems to work when extracting as well, but it only seems to work with .tar. Would it in this case be possible to replace the .tar.xz with an unarchived .tar in-place and then proceed to obtain the list of contents somehow and iteratively extract them with --delete? Or is there a better way of doing this?
