Comment by aa-jv

I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type:

$ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf -

.. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus:

$ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz

Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..