Extracting zstd archive with tar

Zstd is a modern performant file archiving standard widely used to replace .zip, gzip, etc. With modern “tar” extract .zst like:

tar -xf arc.zst

If needed for older tar, specify the program “tar” should use to extract .zst:

tar --use-compress-program=zstd -xf arc.zst

Matlab can extract .zst files.

For very old “tar” one may get:

zstd: error 25 : Write error : Broken pipe (cannot write compressed block) tar: Error opening archive: Child process exited with status 25

In this case, use a two-step process to extract the .zst file fully:

zstd -d myfile.zst   # creates tar file "myfile"
tar -xf myfile       # extract the original file/directory hierarchy