I have a large tarball that is busy being FTP'd over from a remote system to our local system.
I want to know if it is possible to start untarring lets say 50 files at a time so that those files can begin being processed while the transfer takes place.
Best Answer
Here is a detailed explanation on how it is possible to extract specific files from an archive. Specifically GNU tar can be used to extract a single or more files from a tarball. To extract specific archive members, give their exact member names as arguments.
For example:
You can also extract those files that match a specific globbing pattern (wildcards). For example, to extract from cbz.tar all files that begin with pic, no matter their directory prefix, you could type:
To extract all php files, enter:
Where,
-x
: instructs tar to extract files.-f
: specifies filename / tarball name.-v
: Verbose (show progress while extracting files).-j
: filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.-z
: filter archive through gzip, use to decompress .gz files.--wildcards
: instructs tar to treat command line arguments as globbing patterns.--no-anchored
: informs it that the patterns apply to member names after any / delimiter.