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How can I relocate files from a tar archive with extracting the files?

Last updated: 02/08/2012

When you are extracting data from a tar archive, sometimes you want to relocate the files, here's the way to do it:

# cd target_directory
# tar -xvf tarfile.tar --strip-components=1 file_path

The "strip_components" flag takes off the number of directories from the path as specified. The "file_path" is used if you just want part of the tar archive, rather than to unpack the entire thing.

So, if your tar archive contains files like this:

public_html/pictures/xyz.jpg

and you want to untar them into your images directory, you could do this:

# cd images
# tar -xvf ../file.tar --strip_compenents=2 public_html/pictures

This should put the image files directly into your images/ directory.

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How can I relocate files from a tar archive with extracting the files?