How to extract a single folder and its subfolders from a "tarball" (.tar.gz)

I need to extract a single folder and its subfolders from a tarball (.tar.gz) on a CentOS server. I haven't the slightest clue how to do it using an SSH terminal.

I tried:

gunzip -c files_20100623.0110.tar.gz | tar -xvf home/bsisplas/public_html/staging/template/*.*

However it can't seem to find the file in the archive. Also, where in the gunzip syntax do you specify where the extracted files should go? I'm a Linux terminal noob to say the least.

First, when you use the -f option to tar, you need to give it an argument telling it the filename of the archive. Since you're feeding it from a pipe from gunzip, we use - to mean standard input:

gunzip -c files_20100623.0110.tar.gz | tar -xvf - home/bsisplas/public_html/staging/template/*.*

My next point would be that you only have to give the directory name. (Also: *.* is usually a DOS-ism. If you mean "all files" in Unix, just write *. If you write *.* you're saying "all files with a dot somewhere in their name" which could exclude important files without a dot, like Makefile or README):

gunzip -c files_20100623.0110.tar.gz | tar -xvf - home/bsisplas/public_html/staging/template

That should work. But you can make things a little easier by using tar's -z option, which tells it to do the gunzip itself. We use that, and replace the - input filename with the archive filename:

tar -xvzf files_20100623.0110.tar.gz home/bsisplas/public_html/staging/template

How does that work?

All you need is tar. You can get a list of files in the tarball with the -t option, and then extract as normal but with the file path as a final argument: tar zxvf foo.tar.gz filepath