Google-chrome – Chromium: prevent unpacking tar.gz

chromiumgoogle-chromegzipmime-typestar

The latest Chrome and Chromium seems to unpack .tar.gz files automatically for me on OS X and Linux. When using wget with the same URL, it shows:

$ wget http://mydomain/dir/file.tar.gz
...
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: ... [application/octet-stream]
...

Verifying the file type:

$ file file.tar.gz
file.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT)

When doing the same for the file downloaded with Chrome or Chromium:

$ file file.tar.gz
file.tar.gz: POSIX tar archive

Note, that Chrome/Chromium obviously kept the file name, but expanded it (the file size is ~4 times bigger than from the wget-downloaded file).

As website administrator how can I prevent Chrome/Chromium from unpacking the file?

Update:

According to curl -I http://mydomain/dir/file.tar.gz our Apache/Tomcat combo responds with

Content-Encoding: x-gzip

Tried .tar.gz files from other websites are not unpacked by chrome and don't report the Content-Encoding: x-gzip header, so there seems to be a relation.

Best Answer

Your web server is likely sending the .tar.gz file with a content-encoding: gzip header, causing the web browser to assume a gzip layer was applied only to save bandwidth, and what you really intended to send was the .tar archive. Chrome un-gzips it on the other side like it would with any other file (.html, .js, .css, etc.) that it receives gzipped (it dutifully doesn't modify the filename though).

To fix this, make sure your web server serves .tar.gz files without the content-encoding: gzip header.

More Info: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=83292

Related Solutions

Google-chrome – Make Chrome always open PDFs itself

The "Redirector" answer was just what I was looking for, but that extension is no longer available. So I kept digging and found Modify Content-Type. It's working as I expected (PDFs open in the internal viewer despite Content-Disposition: attachment in the response headers) with a rule of:

URL Filter:       .*
Original Type:    application/.*pdf
Replacement Type: application/pdf
Disposition:      inline

Note well that this may expose you to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, and you would be wise not to allow .* in the URL filter. Add to it only as needed.

Find out the size of a .tar.gz archive in the terminal without unpacking

Sure. Just use -tv to list the contents with their sizes. E.g.

% tar -tvzf sometools2.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r-- madler/admin   3442 2005-02-27 21:40 pngdat.c
-rw-r--r-- madler/admin  24938 2005-02-27 21:39 infgen.c

If you want to add up the sizes (like du), you can use awk:

% tar -tvzf sometools2.tar.gz|awk '{ s += $3 } END { print s }'
28380

For an imbedded .tar.gz file, you would need to do those individually when you find them by sending them to stdout with -O:

% tar -tvzf imbed.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r-- madler/staff    505 2012-02-12 00:06 lucas.c
-rw-r--r-- madler/staff  27913 2005-03-20 11:10 lzwtry.c
-rw-r--r-- madler/staff   8314 2005-02-27 21:42 sometools2.tar.gz
% tar -xOzf imbed.tar.gz sometools2.tar.gz | tar -tvzf - | awk '{ s += $3 } END { print s }'
28380

You can write a script to find those in the -tv output and then extract them, and even do it recursively. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Note, these options are for GNU tar, which is what is on both Linux and Mac OS X. The options for BSD tar may be different.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Google-chrome – Make Chrome always open PDFs itself

Find out the size of a .tar.gz archive in the terminal without unpacking

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