Ubuntu – Extract specific folder from tarball into specific folder

command linetar

I created a tarball on Ubuntu 14.04 with:

cd /tmp
tar -cfvz archive.tar.gz /folder

Now I want to extract a specific folder in the tarball (which inside the tarball lies in /tmp) into a specific folder:

cd /tmp
tar -xfvz archive.tar.gz folder/in/archive -C /tmp/archive

The result should be a new folder in /tmp called archive. Is this correct? Especially the missing slash (relative path) for the folder to be extracted and the absolute path with the leading slash for the folder to create?

Best Answer

Tl;dr

Since you are in /tmp already, you can just discard the -C option (since by default tar will extract files in the current working directory) and just add --strip-components=2:

tar --strip-components=2 -xfvz archive.tar.gz folder/in/archive

GNU tar by default stores relative paths.

Whether an archive uses relative paths can be checked by running tar -tf archive | head -n 1, which will print the path of the first file in the archive; if that file's path is a relative path, all the files in the archive use relative paths:

% tar -tf bash-4.3.tar.gz | head -n 1
bash-4.3/

To extract a single file / folder from an archive that uses relative paths without its ancestors into a relative path you'll need two options: -C and --strip-components=N: in the example below the archive bash-4.3.tar.gz uses relative paths and contains a file bash-4.3/doc/bash.html which is extracted into a relative path path (-C specifies the directory in which to extract the files, --strip-components=2 specifies that the parent and the parent of the parent of the extracted files should be ignored, so in this case only bash.html will be extracted into the target directory):

% tree
.
├── bash-4.3.tar.gz
└── path

1 directory, 1 file
% tar -tf bash-4.3.tar.gz | grep -F 'bash.html'
bash-4.3/doc/bash.html
% tar -C path --strip-components=2 -zxf bash-4.3.tar.gz bash-4.3/doc/bash.html
% tree
.
├── bash-4.3.tar.gz
└── path
    └── bash.html

1 directory, 2 files

So, back to your command, since you are in /tmp already, you can just discard the -C option (since by default tar will extract files in the current working directory) and just add --strip-components=2:

tar --strip-components=2 -xfvz archive.tar.gz folder/in/archive
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