Is it possible to create a target directory, similar to mkdir -p, where I can define a non-existent target directory within my tar command, and tar will create the directory for me?
I know I can redirect the output to a directory using tar -C /target/dir, but this doesn't work if the target directory is non-existent.
tar -xvf bash.html_node.tar.gz --one-top-level
From man page of tar command
--one-top-level[=DIR]Extract all files into DIR, or, if used without argument, into a subdirectory named by the base name of the archive (minus standard compression suffixes recognizable by
--auto-compress).
----- test
tar zxvf ../aaa.tgz --one-top-level
aaa/
aaa/222
aaa/111
tree aaa
aaa/
├── 111
└── 222
// if tgz name same as root_dir of archive, no other effect
mv ../aaa.tgz ../bbb.tgz
tar zxvf ../bbb.tgz --one-top-level
aaa/
aaa/222
aaa/111
tree bbb
bbb
└── aaa
├── 111
└── 222
// if tgz name not same as root_dir of archive, create a top-level dir
--one-top-level option, it appears.
--one-top-level is available as of GNU Tar 1.28.
mkdir -p /target/dir && tar -C /target/dir
mkdir -p /target/dir && tar -C $_
$_ is a special parameter in Bash that expands to the last argument to the previous command.
This made more sense to me: mkdir -p /create/folder && tar -zxf haroopad-v0.13.0_x64.tar.gz -C /create/testfolder
mkdir makes the folder although I don't quite understand the -p switch. && lets you execute a second command. I used typical tar switches but at the end -C is used to change directories and extract to that location needed.
reference: extract-files-contained-in-archive-tar-gz-to-new-directory-named-archive
/create if it doesn't exist.
-C doesn't do anything except creating directory which was already created by mkdir.
-C will not create the dir for you and throw error if it does not exists. So either use in tandem with mkdir or --one-top-level. Unless you want to create custom dir for the content and you manage the destination separately and therefore use --strip-components=N or you can try --transform. Keep in mind I'm not sure about the POSIX form. I think this is why handling the destination dir with mkdir is the safest.
If you don't know the paths to create...
Get the needed paths from the tar file, then create them...
for P in \`tar tvf tarfile.tar |tr -s [:space:] |cut -d' ' -f6\`; do
C=\`echo "${P: -1}"\` #get the last character
if [ $C = '/' ]; then
echo "Found directory: $P"
mkdir -p $P
fi
done
All the above answers work - but if the contents inside the tar is within a directory - they won't work the way you want:
So this simple trick worked for me:
tar -xvzf v<tarball>.tar.gz && mv ./<INSIDE_FOLDER> ./<NEW_FOLDER>
