Extracting Tar Files Remotely

The installation of Joomla and Opencart usually takes hours to complete. You’ll be required to upload thousands of files to the server before you can even start the installation. To save time, you can upload a single tar file and untar it using the build in Cron management on the Web Hosting Control Panel.

Here’s how to use cron to untar files

1) Save the following lines as a new file and upload to the cgi-bin folder. Update the path accordingly. Change the file permission to 755.

#!/usr/bin/perl
$result=`/bin/tar -xf /path/to/tar/file/file.tar.gz 2>&1`;
print "tar extraction error: $result" if $?;

2) Upload your tar file to the server.

3) Create a cron job (select “perl” and 5 minutes as the min)

4) The extracting process will start after five minutes. Once the task has been completed, remove the cron job to prevent re-extracting every five minutes, and you’re done!