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PeanutsMonkey
Asked: 2011-07-13 14:34:54 +0800 CST

Can I extract a specific folder using tar to another folder?

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I am new to the world of Linux and seem to have run into a stumbling block. I know I can extract a specifc archive using the command tar xvfz archivename.tar.gz sampledir/ however how can I extract sampledir/ to testdir/ rather than the path that the archive is in e.g.currently the archive is in the path /tmp/archivename.tar.gz and I would like to extract sampledir to testdir which is in the path /tmp/testdir.

linux tar

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What you're looking for is the -C option:

    $ man tar
<snip>

-C, --directory DIR
       change to directory DIR

    Usage, per your example:

    $ tar xvzf archivename.tar.gz -C /tmp/testdir/ sampledir/

    Also, you may be interested to know that modern versions of tar don't require the z flag to decompress gzipped files; they'll notice it's a .gz and Do The Right Thing automatically.

    • 19

  2. You don't need to play crazy games with untarring everything. Tar fully supports only extracting a subset of the files in an archive, as shown in the following (trivial) example:

    /tmp $ mkdir tarsrc
/tmp $ cd tarsrc
/tmp/tarsrc $ mkdir a b
/tmp/tarsrc $ touch a/aaa b/bbb
/tmp/tarsrc $ tar cf ../tartest.tar .
/tmp/tarsrc $ cd ..
/tmp $ mkdir tardest
/tmp $ cd tardest
/tmp/tardest $ tar xf ../tartest.tar ./a    
/tmp/tardest $ ls -R
.:
a/

./a:
aaa

    The trick is that the pathspec must match the contents of the tarfile exactly. So when you do a tar tf, if the path starts with ./, you've got to put that in, and if it doesn't have it, you have to leave it out. Also, if you want to extract a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-path, it'll end up N levels deep in the filesystem when you're done.

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