If <src> is a URL and <dest> does not end with a trailing slash, then a file is downloaded from the URL and copied to <dest>.

If <src> is a URL and <dest> does end with a trailing slash, then the filename is inferred from the URL and the file is downloaded to <dest>/<filename>. For instance, ADD http://example.com/foobar / would create the file /foobar. The URL must have a nontrivial path so that an appropriate filename can be discovered in this case (http://example.com will not work).

If <src> is a local tar archive in a recognized compression format (identity, gzip, bzip2 or xz) then it is unpacked as a directory. Resources from remote URLs are not decompressed. When a directory is copied or unpacked, it has the same behavior as tar -x: the result is the union of:

1. Whatever existed at the destination path and
2. The contents of the source tree, with conflicts resolved in favor of "2." on a file-by-file basis.