Linux – How to unzip a tar gz archive to a specific destination

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.

tar is just copying files together to one big .tar file without compression. bzip2, gzip, xz are file compressors for single files ie. tar files. The extension is .tar.gz, .tar.xz, .tar.bz2 or .tbz(2), .txz, .tgz etc.

tar can only handle .tar files with or without compression with bzip2, xz, gzip. but not non tar'ed .bz2, .xz archives.

Non tar'ed bzip files can be extracted with bzip2 -d file.bz2.