Bash one-liner to untar downloaded Landsat data into separate directories

To make it easier to read I’ve split this into separate lines to post. You could remove the ‘;\’ and it create a multi-line bash script.

When you download Landsat data it comes as a .tar.gz archive (or .tar.bz if you download from Google). To uncompress the files into a separate folder for each scene the following series of bash commands can be used:

for scene in `ls *tar.gz | sed 's/.tar.gz//'`;\
   do echo "Uncompressing ${scene}";\
   mkdir ${scene};\
   mv ${scene}.tar.gz ${scene};\
   cd ${scene};\
   tar -xvf ${scene}.tar.gz;\
   cd -;\
done

This will list all the files matching ‘*.tar.gz’, remove the extension (using sed), print the scene name (echo), make a directory (mkdir), move the .tar.gz archive into it (mv), untar (tar -xvf) and then change back to the original directory (cd -).

You can also use the ‘arcsiextractdata.py’ tool, as detailed in an earlier post