To that end, I've downloaded the latest raspbian-stretch.zip and would like to write a microSD to try out the new system. Is there a way to uncompress the archive and pipe it to dd or an equivalent program to write the image to a spare card? The default Xarchiver on Raspbian seems inclined to extract the contents piecemeal, rather than as a disk image.
What I expected to use was something like sudo unzip -p *.zip | dd of=/dev/sdc but that gives a permissions error, then reports an archive error after the password is entered. The archive is a little over half a gig, which seems reasonable for a sparse image. The machine has only 3.5GB of free space, so I'd rather not write the image to the host's storage if I can help it.
I'd like to complete the operation using Raspbian only. What's the trick I'm missing?
Thanks for reading,
bob prohaska