How to extract the contents of a tar file into an existing directory

KansaiRobot

7/12/24, 7:37 AM

Please do not mistake this question with "how to untar a tar file into an existing directory". For this question there are already answers such as this one

What I am trying to do is to untar an tar.gz file but put the contents into a directory

The linked answer for example when you do it creates a folder (with the name of the tar file) and puts the contents inside the folder

What I want is to not create the folder but put the contents inside an already existing directory.

How can this be done?

0 + 4

command-line

tar

pLumo

7/12/24, 7:42 AM

"What I am trying to do is to untar an tar.gz file but put the contents into a directory" - This is exactly what `tar -xf archive.tar -C /path/to/dir` is doing. There won't be any directories created with the name of the tar file.

KansaiRobot

7/12/24, 7:44 AM

Thanks but actually no. I found that I have to use `--strip-components 1` to do what I intend. Sorry for the confusion

muru

7/12/24, 7:55 AM

That's the second answer in the linked post: https://askubuntu.com/a/470266/158442

pLumo

7/12/24, 8:03 AM

@KansaiRobot This is not true. `--strip-components` will remove the first direrectory INSIDE the `tar` file. So it is content of your `tar` file! `tar -x` won't create any other directories. Note: `--strip-components` means, that if you have the same file name in different directories, they might get overwritten.

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