Ubuntu – Extract only the contents of an archived directory from within an archive

archivecommand lineextracttar

The Situation

I am extracting a CMS from drupal-7.15.tar.gz to /var/www.

When extracted normally (with tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz) the files end up in /var/www/drupal-7.15/

The Goal

I want the contents from the archived drupal-7.15/ directory to extract directly into /var/www

Best Answer

Use

 tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz --strip-components=1

--strip-components=1 tells tar to strip the first path component (the drupal-7.15/ in your case) from each file when unpacking.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – What command do I need to unzip/extract a .tar.gz file

Type man tar for more information, but this command should do the trick:

tar -xvzf community_images.tar.gz

Also, to extract in a specific directory

for eg. to extract the archive into a custom my_images directory .

tar -xvzf community_images.tar.gz -C my_images

To explain a little further, tar collected all the files into one package, community_images.tar. The gzip program applied compression, hence the gz extension. So the command does a couple things:

f: this must be the last flag of the command, and the tar file must be immediately after. It tells tar the name and path of the compressed file.
z: tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip
x: tar can collect files or extract them. x does the latter.
v: makes tar talk a lot. Verbose output shows you all the files being extracted.
C: means change to directory DIR. In our example, DIR is my_images.

Ubuntu – Archive manager that extracts into new folder named after archive

In Ubuntu a right-mouse-click (contexmenu) on a .bz .gz .7z .bz2 etc always unpacks to a folder in my experience. The program used is....fileroller.

Also take a look at this: Is there an 'Extract to...' context menu option for the Archive Manager application in Nautilus?

If all else fails: file-roller -h filename
the -h option forces the creation of a directory in which the files are unpacked. The name of the directory is the same as the archive name minus the filename extention. see: man file-roller