How do I untar a subdirectory into the current directory?

unix command-line tar
Cory R. King picture Cory R. King · May 10, 2009 · Viewed 48.6k times · Source

How to I extract a subdirectory in a tarball into the current directory?

Example, the tarball from wordpress:

wordpress/
wordpress/wp-trackback.php
wordpress/wp-config-sample.php
wordpress/wp-settings.php
wordpress/wp-rss2.php
wordpress/readme.html
wordpress/index.php
...

How do I extract everything under wordpress/ into the current directory? In otherwords, it will not create a wordpress directory.

I've tried this with no luck:

tar xvfz latest.tar.gz wordpress -C ./

I know I can extract it normally and move it back, but I figure there has to be a way to do it in one shot.

Answer

kch picture kch · May 10, 2009

Why don't you untar normally, then just:

mv wordpress/.* .
mv wordpress/* .
rmdir wordpress

But alas, there's:

tar --strip-components=1 -zxvf wordpress.tgz

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