Linux – How to untar a file skipping the beginning of the directory structure

You can use xargs to feed the output of a command as arguments to another:

find . -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 tar zcvf the_tarball.tar.gz

Note here the -print0 from find and -0 from xargs work in conjunction to delimit file names correctly (so that names with spaces and such aren't a problem).

There is a Perl script written by Daniel S. Sterling available at https://gist.github.com/eqhmcow/5389877 (referenced from IO::Uncompress::Unzip) that looks like it could almost do what you need.

• Change line 46 to read my $status, $filenumber = 0;
• Comment lines 52-54 (put # at the beginning of each line)
• Change line 61 to read my $destfile = "file" . $filenumber++;

The entire script, with these modifications, is presented below for reference:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# example perl code, this may not actually run without tweaking, especially on Windows

use strict;
use warnings;

=pod
IO::Uncompress::Unzip works great to process zip files; but, it doesn't include a routine to actually
extract an entire zip file.
Other modules like Archive::Zip include their own unzip routines, which aren't as robust as IO::Uncompress::Unzip;
eg. they don't work on zip64 archive files.
So, the following is code to actually use IO::Uncompress::Unzip to extract a zip file.
=cut

use File::Spec::Functions qw(splitpath);
use IO::File;
use IO::Uncompress::Unzip qw($UnzipError);
use File::Path qw(mkpath);

# example code to call unzip:
unzip(shift);

=head2 unzip
Extract a zip file, using IO::Uncompress::Unzip.
Arguments: file to extract, destination path
    unzip('stuff.zip', '/tmp/unzipped');
=cut

sub unzip {
    my ($file, $dest) = @_;

    die 'Need a file argument' unless defined $file;
    $dest = "." unless defined $dest;

    my $u = IO::Uncompress::Unzip->new($file)
        or die "Cannot open $file: $UnzipError";

    my $status, $filenumber = 0;
    for ($status = 1; $status > 0; $status = $u->nextStream()) {
        my $header = $u->getHeaderInfo();
        my (undef, $path, $name) = splitpath($header->{Name});
        my $destdir = "$dest/$path";

        # unless (-d $destdir) {
        #     mkpath($destdir) or die "Couldn't mkdir $destdir: $!";
        # }

        if ($name =~ m!/$!) {
            last if $status < 0;
            next;
        }

        my $destfile = "file" . $filenumber++;
        my $buff;
        my $fh = IO::File->new($destfile, "w")
            or die "Couldn't write to $destfile: $!";
        while (($status = $u->read($buff)) > 0) {
            $fh->write($buff);
        }
        $fh->close();
        my $stored_time = $header->{'Time'};
        utime ($stored_time, $stored_time, $destfile)
            or die "Couldn't touch $destfile: $!";
    }

    die "Error processing $file: $!\n"
        if $status < 0 ;

    return;
}

1;